Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

The black community has been the foundation of the progressive community in this country for a long time.

I don't get up in the morning and think my mission is to end Britain. I do get up in the morning and think that my mission is to end poverty.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

In your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time

Every progressive movement has been built on the anger, needs, and aspirations of the emerging major class.

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!

I hear Democrats say, 'The Affordable Care Act is the law,' as though we're supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.

Ignorance, poverty, and greed must disappear so that light can prevail in all places.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

Exploitation of the poor can be extinguished not by effecting the destruction of a few millionaires, but by removing the ignorance of the poor and teaching them to non-cooperate with their exploiters.

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

America is the promised land, because each generation bequeathed to its children a promise, a promise that they might not come to enjoy but which they fully expected their offspring to fulfill. So the words 'all men are created equal' took a life of its own, ultimately destined to end slavery and enfranchise women. And the words 'equal protection' and 'due process' inevitably led to the end of the words 'separate but equal,' ensuring that the walls of segregation would crumble, whether at the lunch counter or at the voting booth.

Martin Luther King was talking about racism, war and poverty. I think we have made progress enormous progress in racism and war, but we have made little or no progress in poverty. And it's because the economy has gotten more and more complex as we have globalized.

Our problem is that we don't have enough people in America, including black people, who are progressive and willing to sacrifice their popularity in order to tell the truth.

Giving people equal access to enjoying the benefits of America is the biggest problem that we're not making any progress in resolving.

I thank God that I've lived long enough to see what I have seen, and I pray that people will continue to do better. We are doing better, it may not seem so, but there was a time when people were lynched in the middle of the street and it was not against the law. We are doing better, but we have so much more to do.

No sustainable development, environmental harmony or lasting security will happen if we are unable to eradicate hunger and extreme inequality

Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.

I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstructs its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

We are growing up. We are growing up! Out of the idiocies - the ignorances of racism and sexism and ageism and all those ignorances.

While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.