John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

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.

The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.

Through periodic increases over the next three decades under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the nation achieved one of the fundamental goals of a just society, which is that no one who works for a living should have to live in poverty.

We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we've got to go forward in the fight to make that happen.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

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

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

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.

But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.

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

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

Let’s make the poor richer.

In a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everybody should prosper.

There's enough wealth in the world that no one should go without.

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

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty.

Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.

Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent

Public policy today is favoring the rich, not the poor. It's not addressing the needs of the poor.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

We want a better America, an America that will give its citizens, first of all, a higher and higher standard of living so that no child will cry for food in the midst of plenty.

If you really want to end income inequality, I've got the way to fix it. People who don't work shouldn't get any income.

Measures should be enacted which, without violating the rights of property, would reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.