Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists … poverty is slavery!

Political and economic insecurity inevitably translates into insecurity in people's everyday lives, from lack of access to welfare to the increasing lack of security in the workplace.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

Poverty is unnecessary.

We oppose the benefit cap. We oppose social cleansing. We will bring the welfare bill down by controlling rents and boosting wages, not by impoverishing families and socially cleansing our communities.

The rich become richer and the poor become poorer is a cry heard throughout the whole civilized world.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child's joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, 'What are we going to do?' but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that's nothing.

If you neglect those who are currently poor and stable, you may create more poor and unstable people. There has been a tremendous concentration of donor interest in countries that are seen as particularly fragile - but it becomes harder to mobilise money for sub-Saharan, plain poor countries.

Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery.

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Global poverty is a powder keg ignitable by our own indifference.

Poverty breeds a lack of self reliance.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

A broke nation is a weak nation.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

Inequality of income is bad for everyone, not just the poor and the middle class.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.