Jimmy Carter Quotes

They are all afraid to face high taxation to pay for the war. The rich won't stand it—and the poor can't stand it.

What we shouldn't be doing is borrowing money to give benefits to the most fortunate, to put the burden and pull the rug out of those who struggle the most.

The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve.

It is day after day in this institution, borrow money, run up the debt, run up the deficits and then with a straight face say, we are going to repeal a tax that affects 1 percent of the American people, just 1 percent of the American people.

I don't want to remember 2005 as a year that the government heaped unnecessary burdens upon American families. Stealing from the poor and middle class and giving to the rich, while increasing the deficit, is hardly responsible.

In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.

Obama might as well be president of Turkey or Brazil; it does not matter. It's the system that is absolutely flawed, where 25 or 35 or 50 people make multi, multi-billions on building Olympic structures while people live in Barbados and have no roads or clean drinking water. There's something pretty inequitable there.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

If the nation is rich but people are poor, the country cannot be strong, and society will be unstable.

We shouldn't be undermining Medicare for those who need it most in order to give more tax cuts to those who need them least.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

Richness in the world is a result of other people's poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.

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

Government has really been growing, a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren't. And that's what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world.

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

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

I don't think they [Congress] ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

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.

Very few governments have the money to meet the needs of their people….The private sector has most of the resources.

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

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

The military budget got out of control and the tax cuts were helping the wealthy …. President Reagan was less and less interested in what I had to say

If, in a country, the wealth is concentrated in the hands of only the few, it cannot witness harmony and stability.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.