“If you haven't got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”
“Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.”
“Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.”
“I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.”
“A rich man without charity is a rogue; and perhaps it would be no difficult matter to prove that he is also a fool.”
“Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.”
“Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness, when bequeathed by those who. when alive, would not have contributed.”
“The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.”
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work ;we are in.”
“The best loved by God are those that are rich, yet have the humility of the poor, and those that are poor and have the magnanimity of the rich.”
“Should we grieve over a little misplaced charity, when an all knowing, all wise Being showers down every day his benefits on the unthankful and undeserving?”
“Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.”
“You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.”
“As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.”
“They take the paper and they read the headlines. So they've heard of unemployment and they've heard of bread-lines. And they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball.”
“Sometimes when I'm swimming, I think that maybe someday I'll put my red Speedo up for auction. Or maybe I'll donate it to the Smithsonian. They can stuff it with two plums and a gherkin and put it on display.”
“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things.”
“Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.”
“Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”
“A man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a three penny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll have him cold-bloodedly handed over to the police.”
“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
“Prayer carries us half way to God, fasting brings us to the door of His palace, and alms-giving procures us admission.”