"Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own"
About this Quote
Mother Teresa’s line works because it refuses to let wealth serve as an alibi for emotional neglect. “Even the rich” is a moral provocation: a deliberate glance at the people most audiences are tempted to resent or dismiss. By granting them hunger, she collapses the easy binary of the deserving poor and the insulated wealthy, insisting that loneliness is not a luxury problem but a human one.
The rhetoric is built on repetition that sounds simple but lands like a ledger of unmet needs: “for love, for being cared for, for being wanted.” Each phrase tightens the frame from abstract feeling to concrete recognition. Then she turns it into ownership language - “someone to call their own” - a risky choice that mirrors the way modern life commodifies intimacy. In her mouth, it’s less about possession than about belonging, the ache to be claimed by a relationship that holds.
The subtext is strategic. She’s not flattering the rich; she’s indicting a society that treats care as secondary to comfort, and status as a substitute for connection. It also functions as a fundraising and conscience-sharpening tool: if the rich can be starved for love, then charity can’t just be a transfer of money downward. It has to be presence, touch, attention - the kinds of “services” that don’t scale.
In the late 20th-century world she inhabited - mass urban poverty alongside gleaming affluence - the statement reads as both pastoral counseling and public rebuke: you can’t buy your way out of being unheld.
The rhetoric is built on repetition that sounds simple but lands like a ledger of unmet needs: “for love, for being cared for, for being wanted.” Each phrase tightens the frame from abstract feeling to concrete recognition. Then she turns it into ownership language - “someone to call their own” - a risky choice that mirrors the way modern life commodifies intimacy. In her mouth, it’s less about possession than about belonging, the ache to be claimed by a relationship that holds.
The subtext is strategic. She’s not flattering the rich; she’s indicting a society that treats care as secondary to comfort, and status as a substitute for connection. It also functions as a fundraising and conscience-sharpening tool: if the rich can be starved for love, then charity can’t just be a transfer of money downward. It has to be presence, touch, attention - the kinds of “services” that don’t scale.
In the late 20th-century world she inhabited - mass urban poverty alongside gleaming affluence - the statement reads as both pastoral counseling and public rebuke: you can’t buy your way out of being unheld.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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