Word.ws English Dictionary

the poor we will always have with us

the poor we will always have with us proverb: poverty for some is inevitable.

Proverb

the poor we will always have with us

  1. Poverty for some is inevitable.
    • These beggars on horseback — the poor we will always have with us as long as we give such alms - are forever at the elbows of the secretaries, representatives, senators. The people who pay are at work in their fields, out of sight, scattered over thousands of miles.1894, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth, page 398
    • When the poor are taken by definition to be the lowest 10th or the lowest 5th, or the lowest 3rd, we will, of course, arrive at the not very startling conclusion, “the poor we will always have with us.”1973, Neil W. Chamberlain, Contemporary Economic Issues, page 54

Questions about the poor we will always have with us

What does the poor we will always have with us mean?
The poor we will always have with us means poverty for some is inevitable.
What part of speech is the poor we will always have with us?
The poor we will always have with us is a proverb.

Words near the poor we will always have with us in the dictionary

  1. the plural of anecdote is not data
  2. the pock
  3. The Pocket
  4. The Ponds
  5. the poop out of
  6. the poor we will always have with us
  7. the proof is in the eating
  8. the proof is in the pudding
  9. the proof of the pudding is in the eating
  10. the proverbial dog that caught the car
  11. the purpose of a system is what it does

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: the poor we will always have with us (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “the poor we will always have with us.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/the_poor_we_will_always_have_with_us. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.