28 Movie Quotes about Poverty (Sound Clips)

Last updated on: August 24, 2025

Memorable quotes about poverty, selected from famous or less known movies and other sources by Movie-Sounds.org's visitors, accompanied by short mp3 and wav audio samples.

1 Potatoes. You've got to be poor to eat potatoes. Really poor.

Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2 Where we came from, if one didn't want to die of poverty, one became a priest or a bandit.

Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

3 Children going hungry. Corruption everywhere.

Quote from Mickey Mouse

4 Think of what all those walls are hiding. Broken hopes and bodies and hearts. Absent dreams. Starvation, madness. Crimes of the streets. And tragedies of the river.

Quote from Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

5 The mill's closed. There's no more work. We're destitute. Come in, my little loves. I've got no option but to sell you all, for scientific experiments.

Michael Palin in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

6 I have not little, Sephora. I have nothing.

Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956)

7 Merry Christmas, you say. What right have you to be merry? You're poor enough.

Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol

8 We ain't got nothing but radishes in the garden.

Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939)

9 And where I come from, people boil mashed corn and eat it day after day, all their lives. And to forget their hunger, they dream.

Nadia Gray as Suzy in Mr. Topaze (1961)

10 It's been a bad harvest. The people have nothing. How can we increase the taxes? They won't be able to live.

Quote from Shaolin Prince