Madam C. J. Walker Quotes

Social Security is meant to be - to make sure that no one who's worked hard and played by the rules and paid into the system grows old in poverty in America.

Those born into poverty or on the margins of society require our extra support to realize their dreams.

I'm a product of public housing. My parents grew up poor, but their dream was to own a home.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.

Poverty must be reduced not only for reasons of moral and justice, but also of security.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

I lived through a golden period where society felt that it was good to help people who didn't have a great deal of money fulfil their potential.

I'm 78, I'm on my pension in Ireland, and all that good stuff.

I think most of us would agree that people who have, say, little formal schooling but labor honestly and diligently to help feed, clothe, and educate their families are deserving of greater respect - and help, if necessary - than many people who are superficially more successful.

The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.

First, women are more likely to live in poverty during their retirement years than are men.

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age.

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

What is the alternative to Social Security for those at the lower end of the income distribution whose personal savings by definition are not going to be that high? There really isn’t any.

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

Where else can a guy like me make it? Blind and poor---only in America.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

It’s what you have to do to find a way to kick poverty’s ass.

If you are a pregnant teenage poor girl, you will not likely ever get out of poverty. Nor will your children. Birth control can be the most cost effective anti-poverty possibility that we have.