Vernon Jordan Quotes

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

When the producers of 'Why Poverty?' came to me to do a film about poverty in the United States, I asked if I could do a film about wealth instead. I tend to make films about perpetrators, rather than victims.

Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.

There are people getting screwed in our country every single second, minute, hour of the day. And if by our work, we can decrease that number, we'll make a difference; we'll be doing our jobs.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

Always remember: the alleviation of poverty is never a political or economic issue - it is moral.

We continue to blame the poor for their own condition. They are lazy. We do not want to know that the poorest of the poor are toddlers under three years of age.

Black men of integrity cannot make a deal with a politician and leave out the poor of the nation, all God's children.

Oscar Wilde said the rich and the poor are equal - they can both sleep under the bridge. Right? Do they have a right? You're damn right they have a right!

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

There's prejudice and poverty in Hungary as there is in every country.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

I have said democracy and freedom do not work too well if you are hungry, if you are starving.

We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering.

Remove poverty from politics.

The real threat to the democracy is the half a nation in poverty.

Poverty is ever an inbred growth

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.

Woe to them, that take away the right of the poor.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

If poverty was an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved a long time ago.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.