John F. Kennedy Quotes

In America, the 1 percent and the 10 percent are doing just fine, but the people who are bearing the brunt of this economy are the ones who suffer.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his fellow man.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

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

I do not believe in widening the income gap between rich and poor, and my life's work in the inner city of Detroit demonstrates that far more than any sound bite.

Rising inequality is toxic to growth. High levels of inequality exclude people - both as innovators and customers - diminishing both innovation and demand.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

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

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

There's not a lot of wealth throughout all the country shared equally.

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.