Pittance Quotes & Sayings

BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence exerted over America's politics, its governmental institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defense barons of the Southwest. As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation's earth of its wealth - its coal and coke, its oil and ore, its iron, its forests, the very surface of its earth to provide a footing for the rails of their railroads - and used part of that wealth to ensure that the nation's government would not force them to give more than a pittance of their loot back to the nation's people, so the robber barons of this century have drained the earth of the Southwest of its riches and have used those riches to bend government to their ends. — Robert A. Caro

I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves — Edgar Allan Poe

A sort of animals, to whose share, [ ... ] some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we disarmed ourselves of the few abilities she had bestowed; hand been very successful in multiplying our wants, and seemed to spent our whole lives in vain endeavors to supply them by our own inventions. — Jonathan Swift

I have seen that women are shut out from every means of earning a living that is really remunerative, crowded into certain narrow walks, which, in consequence, are so thronged that the poor creatures are forced to work for the merest pittance. — Lillie Devereux Blake

She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognise that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. 'It's like money in the bank, old girl', he would say ... — William Boyd

Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by their prestige. — Gustave Le Bon

Superiority to fate
Is difficult to learn.
'Tis not conferred by any,
But possible to earn
A pittance at a time,
Until, to her surprise,
The soul with strict economy
Subsists till Paradise. — Emily Dickinson

Capps earned over nine million last year and paid a pittance in taxes. — John Grisham

Fifty Aristotle's equals one King Solomon. — Matshona Dhliwayo

[Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experience, and the man whose experience has embraced only success is likely to be a forlorn and alien figure when his whole world begins to fail. — Richard Hofstadter

African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance. — Wole Soyinka

Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do ... Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all - the poverty, the degradation - she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors ... I shall never forget her. — Studs Terkel

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. — Henry Ford

Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation's wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment? — Ronald Reagan

You have to kiss me," I find myself saying.
"Yeah." He leans closer. "I do. — Huntley Fitzpatrick

Around the world, America's influence has declined while president Barack Obama has destroyed our military, our allies no longer trust us, and our adversaries no longer respect us. — Marco Rubio

I'm really easy to get along with once you see it my way. — Stephen Hawking

A Word Of Thanks
To these I know a debt past telling:
My several muses, harsh and kind;
My folks, who stood my sulks and yelling,
And (in the long run) did not mind;
Dead legislators, whose orations
I've filched to mix my own potations;
Indeed, all those whose brains I've pressed,
Unmerciful, because obsessed;
My own dumb soul, which on a pittance
Survived to weave this fictive spell;
And, gentle reader, you as well,
The fountainhead of all remittance.
Buy me before good sense insists
You'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists. — Vikram Seth

The agencies tried to give the few incentive positions they had to women to encourage what they called 'gender balance' and, apart from those who chose to hustle in the market for a pittance, the remainder of the male population had no ability to provide for their families. They felt emasculated and camouflaged their injured pride in khat and idleness. There was little in their world that they controlled and so the one thing they sought to master, above all else, was their women. Muna — Ben Rawlence

I bought this place for a pittance, because it was a dump. Rejected, abandoned, unwanted. Like me. I fixed it up. Made it mine. — Jasinda Wilder

The new fashions sold in department
stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.
They'd been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance
in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry
that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn't enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as
well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda
the advertising industry. — Mary Doria Russell

Let's live with that small pittance which we have; Who covets more is evermore a slave. — Robert Herrick

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries. — Jorge Luis Borges

What rights have women? ... [they are] punished for breaking laws which they have no voice in making. All avenues to enterprise and honors are closed against them. If poor, they must drudge for a mere pittance if of the wealthy classes, they must be dressed dolls of fashion parlor puppets ... — Ernestine Rose

The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor, but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use. — William Jennings Bryan

If, Sir, I possessed the power of conveying unlimited sexual attraction through the potency of my voice, I would not be reduced to accepting a miserable pittance from the BBC for interviewing a faded female in a damp basement. — Gilbert Harding

Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening. — Iain M. Banks

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it's worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners' house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders, and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance if she gets paid at all. She regularly gets dysentary, giardia, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to. — Rose George

Streams of melting snow. — Kiersten White

The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others. — Robert Owen

I had some years of definite frustration. Auditioning and not working as much as I would have liked to, or working and being paid a pittance, and sort of scrounging by in New York and sleeping on a chair that folded out into a bed. — Gillian Jacobs

I started my own foundation. If you aren't familiar with it, it's called 'Febreezing the homeless.' Who would you rather give money to: a man that smells 4like liquiid garbage, or ocean breeze? — Daniel Tosh

From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream. — Julia Glass

All things are sold: the very light of heaven is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, the smallest and most despicable things that lurk in the abysses of the deep, all objects of our life, even life itself, and the poor pittance which the laws allow of liberty, the fellowship of man, those duties which his heart of human love should urge him to perform instinctively, are bought and sold as in a public mart of not disguising selfishness, that sets on each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign. — Percy Bysshe Shelley