Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.

We are the wealthiest country in the world. There is no excuse not to help poor people….When was the last time you saw poverty mentioned on television.

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

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.

Giving away food only encourages the poor not to starve. Increase productivity, not employment. Insure profits before we insure people Don’t be haters! We’re job creators. Bailout banks, not these losers (people evicted by banks foreclosing on their mortgages).

Destroy poverty, that source of crime, by assuring to each the satisfaction of all needs! And how difficult is this to achieve?

But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?

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've got the wrong vision, the wrong values, the wrong priority, and as the great prophetic figure Marian Edelman Wright puts it, we have been AWOL when it comes to poor people and poor children.

It is impossible to comfort men's hearts with the love of God when their feet are perishing with cold.

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 should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.

We hold the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance.

Not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth, but theirs.

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.

For half of the world's population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an "electocracy" than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life--food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.

Poverty calls us to sow hope.... Poverty is the flesh of the poor Jesus, in that child who is hungry, in the one who is sick, in those unjust social structures.

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.

America is concerned more with the possibility of moon folks than the reality of hungry poor folks.

The wealth of this land must be immediately redistributed among its 125 million people if America is to be saved as a country.

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

Almost one-fourth of our children are living in poverty. No other western industrialized nation has anything close to that figure. This is not an act of God. There is no divine intervention that says children in America have to live in poverty more than children in Italy, or Denmark, or Great Britain, or Canada, or other western industrialized nations. It a result of flawed policy. It is a result of policy that panders to those who make campaign contributions rather than to needs

Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor. Never in this happy country or elsewhere except in the Land of Miracle, where "they did all eat and were filled"-has there been enough of anything for the people. Never since time began have all the sons and daughters of men been all warm, and all filled, and all shod and roofed.