Dick Gregory Quotes

Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

Poverty in America wears a diaper much more often than it wears a hearing aid. Money desperately needed by poor kids is going to rich elderly.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

…nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.

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

We have to stop letting people come in here and make millionaires and billionaires of themselves off of West Virginia while West Virginia remains poor.

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

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

You and I can be busy, and we take a vacation from work. You can't take a break from being poor. You can't say, 'Hey I've had enough of worrying about money, I'm just going to be rich for a couple of weeks until I've recovered.'

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.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

How can a man help breaking the law when he don't have money to live on?

Poverty affects people of all races.

Money can't buy poverty.

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.

It is clear that the economy has not gotten better for everyone.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

My office has a view of low-cost housing, old East German prefabricated apartment buildings. It isn't an attractive view, but it's very helpful, because it reminds me to ask myself, whenever there is a decision to be made, whether the people who live there can afford our decisions.

Part of this country's problem is that people from New York City - Wall Streeters - don't think about the little guy who can't afford things.

It's true across the U.K. that those who had least to do with causing the economic crisis are carrying the heaviest burden. That's unacceptable.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

I have always had a horror and detestation of poverty.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.