Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

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.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

I regard philanthropy as a tragic apology for wrong conditions under which human beings live.

It's an irony that growing inequality could mean more money for philanthropy. In the U.S., quite a few of the ultra-rich have taken to heart the 19th century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie's comment that it's a disgrace to die wealthy.

The world needs a person like me so that many other rich people will be able to follow my role model. If they do, many poor people will be helped.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.

The billionaire who sits on his money and doesn't do anything for the common good - I'm not interested in that person.

The responsibility of philanthropy rests with us. The wealthier we are, the more powerful we get. We cannot put the entire onus on the government.

Obviously, I have certain policy positions that I push and advocate for that would benefit people dealing in a system that breeds inequality and makes life more difficult for people.

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

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.

Everything must be in contrast at an affair like this. You know, to show anything off properly you must have the contrast. Now, I am here tonight representing poverty. We have enough wealth right here at this table, right here at the speaker's table alone---their conscience should hurt them, which I doubt if it does---so that we could liquidate our national debt. Every rich man reaches a time in his career when he comes to a turning point and starts to give it away.

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.

Remove poverty from politics.

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.

Our nation cannot call for respect for human rights when it lacks the moral courage to save its own cities, its own poor, its own minorities whose rights are trampled upon.

It is nothing less than a shocking indictment on western society that we spend so much on ourselves and so little on those on have nothing.

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

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

In the 19th century, some people looked at the condition of slavery and said that it was monstrous and unconscionable; that it must be abolished. ... Today the condition of hunger in a world of plenty is equally monstrous and unconscionable and it too must be abolished. We must become the 'new abolitionists'.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

The wealthy have a responsibility to invest in addressing inequality. This is especially true when constraints on others are so great.