Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

Growth is a panacea for many ills in society; not entirely, but many.

We must moderate both opulence and indigence by raising the wages of the poor, improving their habits, and lifting them above ignorance, plunder, and theft.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control.

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

I was the father of Canada's social revolution; you will create the country's economic revolution.

When the object is to raise the permanent condition of a people, small means do not merely produce small effects; they produce no effect at all.

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

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

Since the war [WWII], the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented and exhilarating speed … Yet Britain lags behind, lacking the will or the plan which can bring this future within the reach of us all.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

He [Jacob Riis] had the most flaming intensity of passion for righteousness.

We want to be a country with a competitive edge in the world. And a country with a solid democracy. To do that, we need to attack the social problems, and extreme poverty is probably the worst of those.

Everything changes.... Social life changes, and with it the "national question" changes, too. At different periods different classes enter the arena, and each class has its own view of the "national question." Consequently, in different periods the "national question" serves different interests and assumes different shades, according to which class raises it, and when.

We will not rest until this war [on poverty] is won.

The workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved Utopia but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger.

The lesson of the past 100 years is that as the United States grows wealthier, Americans become willing to spend more to insure risk and enhance fairness. Advances in social policy come only intermittently but they do come. And when they come, they usually last.

If one truly wishes to found a more just and rational social order, it is not enough to count on the caprices of technology.

We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just.

Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.

Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution.

I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants.

A universal voucher program would change the face of poverty in this country.

Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.