If the misery of our poor is caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

In the end, poverty, putridity and pestilence; work, wealth and worry; health, happiness and hell, all simmer down into village problems.

One of the largest promises of science is, that the sum of human happiness will be increased, ignorance destroyed, and, with ignorance, prejudice and superstition, and that great truth taught to all, that this world and all it contains were meant for our use and service; and that where nature by her own laws has defined the limits of original unfitness, science may by extract so modify those limits as to render wholesome that which by natural wildness was hurtful, and nutritious that which by natural poverty was unnourishing. We do not yet know half that chemistry may do by way of increasing our food.

Poverty is a virtue greatly exaggerated by physicians no longer forced to practise it.

Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich.

The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty—not marble floors and foundations.

The world is a very different one now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.