Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

We cannot afford to spend millions and millions over nuclear arms when there is poverty and unemployment all around us.

To me poverty, mental health, and addictions don't sound like criminal justice problems. They sound to me like a social justice problem.

It doesn't matter what color you are. Poverty is poverty. Inmates come from all walks of life. We have to make sure we look out for these people and give them a chance.

My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.

You know it's funny, when it rains it pours they got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

I know my dear brother, President [Barack] Obama, has a bust of Martin King right there in the Oval Office, but the question is are is he going to be true to who that Martin Luther King, Jr., actually is? King was concerned about what? The poor. He was concerned about working people. He was concerned about quality jobs. He was concerned about quality housing. He was concerned about precious babies in Vietnam, the way we ought to be concerned about precious babies in Afghanistan and precious babies in Tel Aviv and precious babies in Gaza.

There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.

We must begin by acknowledging that there is a complete absence of two things in Indian Society. One of these is equality. On the social plane we have an India based on the principles of graded inequality, which means elevation for some and degradation for others. On the economic plane we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty.

We have so many issues today that we need to confront. Comprehensive immigration reform. We have to solve the issue of poverty, the issue of hunger, the issue of war - spending billions of dollars to kill rather than to build. We have to deal with the fact that all of our children should be receiving the best possible education.

The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight.

I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

Poverty calls us to sow hope.... Poverty is the flesh of the poor Jesus, in that child who is hungry, in the one who is sick, in those unjust social structures.

Poverty is the openmouthed relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough.

Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.

The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

Indeed, as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.