David Brooks Quotes

Collectively, we activists are essential to advancing U.S. policy to help empower marginalized people to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty for good.

No, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, people don't want handouts. They want purpose.

It's well proven that if you have equality in society, society flourishes, and if you have inequality, it doesn't. So it's good for everybody.

We need radical, transformative solutions to address the inequality that is blighting millions of people's lives.

To all people of good will who are working for social justice: never tire of working for a more just world, marked by greater solidarity!

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.

We have learned to turn out lots of goods and services, but we haven't learned as well how to have everybody share in the bounty. The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.

We are in the middle of a world revolution, and I don't mean Communism. The revolution I'm talking about is that of the little, poor people all over the world. They're beginning to learn what there is in life, and to learn what they are missing.

As inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying - as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.

When we really need to work hard to make sure that these ideas about constructive social change culturally, ecologically and politically, come to pass. And that's only going to happen if people support the leadership, because the same power structures are still in place, and it's not in their best interests to change.

Integration begins the day after the minds of the people are desegregated.

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty--to the poor and humble.

Without peace there can be no prosperity for any people, rich or poor. And yet, there can be no peace without erasing the harshness of the growing contrast between the rich and the poor.

Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across America that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned.

I don't absolve the Democrats of their lack of commitment to deal with poverty. But nowadays we're witnessing the widening of the gap. There's something wrong when a handful of people have more than they'll ever need while millions of people have less than they always need.

I'm just seeing as I grow older, and hopefully wiser, that a lot of things I see from a race perspective are class problems too, so I should be advocating for all.

Nothing will make me change my principles. Even with the knife at my neck I shall still declare, up to this day, the poor have done everything; it is time for the rich to take their turn... The selfish people, the young idlers, must be made useful, whether they like it or not, and some respite be procured for the useful and respectable worker.

I want us to raise the national minimum wage, because people who live in poverty should not - who work full-time should not still be in poverty.

How much more of an injustice is it that people who work get more money than people who don't work?

Fighting by itself doesn't interest me anymore. I want to help people, the black people and I need any kind of media to spread my thought: God, charity, peace.

It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.

There have always been two theories about inequality. One is that it reflects just deserts. The other is that there are large elements of exploitation and inequality of opportunities. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the increase in inequality is associated with those negative factors. If it were all social contribution, then when the top did better, they would be contributing to everybody's well-being. That trickle-down hasn't happened. We've seen median income, people in the middle, actually worse off than they were 25 years ago.