Pope Francis Quotes

Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place.

We have no right to luxuries while the poor want bread.

In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.

It's not that I am against the rich giving money to charities. I'm all for it, and we should think of ways of encouraging more of it. But I also believe that states, rather than individuals, are ultimately a better bet for delivering a fair and just world and reconciling differing interests.

The fundamental purpose of … productivity must not be the mere multiplication of products. It must not be profit or domination. Rather, it must be the service of the human person

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.

The wealthy have a responsibility to invest in addressing inequality. This is especially true when constraints on others are so great.

Seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

The 400 of us [the richest Americans] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you're in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

The time has come for an all-out war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these".

The Curse of poverty has no justification in our age...The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

If the money is raised by taxation, then the burden will fall where it ought to fall, . . . and the rich and stingy will no longer be able to evade the duties of citizenship and of humanity.

We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return.

We have to get out of this mindset that the rich will do the business and the poor will have the charity.

Equality begins with economic empowerment.

Money, as it increases, becomes either the master or the slave of ts owner.

Whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.

Art should be on the side of humanity.

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.

The first world is going to have to account for this sort of horrible poverty in our midst. We have to, first of all, become aware of it. We have to take responsibility for it. And then we have to do something about it for our own freedom, for our own salvation, for our own humanity.

We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living.

In this, of all the countries in the world, possession of inordinate wealth by individuals should be held as a crime against Indian humanity.

Another world is possible, without the 1 percent.