John F. Kennedy Quotes

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

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

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true, that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

We need to have the social investments by which to quote unquote distribute some of that wealth.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

In a morally adjusted economy ... the rich should not get richer if the poor get poorer.

It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country -- and by rich people I mean the super-rich -- will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.

Unequal wealth distribution is a risk factor for inequality that must be attacked by policies.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The bigger the gap there is between the rich and the poor, the less stable and successful the society will be