Bob Menendez Quotes

To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the harborless without also trying to change the social order so that people can feed, clothe and shelter themselves is just to apply palliatives. It is to show a lack of faith in one’s fellows, their responsibilitie s as children of God, heirs of heaven.

If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people's lives are better, you know it's hard, and some people think it's boring.

I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.

Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across America that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned.

Real progress comes from people.

I would like to solemnly reaffirm, that poverty is not a fatality.

A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that's revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.

Reading equals hope times change.

For me, it's not an option to despair. The question is: what can we do to make someone's life better? Take the unimaginable strides made in places like Bosnia, where I cut my teeth, and Rwanda. Their stories aren't perfect, but I wouldn't have dreamt they could happen in a million years.

I am unapologetic about the need for social change, greater inclusion, and equity.

At its best, technology can empower people in extraordinary ways.

People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.

People don't need to become more aware of poverty - they need to know how to end it.

There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.

We wanted to bring attention to the fact that we had so many deals taking place that we could have made change for the better for all people, and we felt that we would be a catalyst to bring this to attention to society.

People can change their own lives, provided they have the right kind of institutional support. They're not asking for charity, charity is no solution to poverty. Poverty is the creation of opportunities like everybody else has, not the poor people, so bring them to the poor people, so that they can change their lives.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.

Development must be such that it positively transforms the lives of the common people.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I'm still thinking and hoping there's an opportunity for people to have better lives and that significant change can occur.

Haiti has changed a lot.

It means that through knowledge have come responsibility and hope, and through both, action.

If people are given the opportunity to really make a difference in their own lives, their own communities, their own businesses and their own governments, then we can really transform the prospects of life on this planet. We can find ourselves living in a world that is more like the world that I think most of us want to be living in.

The necessary transformation of which I speak and of which my presidency will be a part is built on turning creative possibilities into live realities for all our people.