David Cannadine Quotes

If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

I am most supportive of organizations whose goal is to increase the living situation of those less fortunate than myself.

There are so many people and organisations that work quietly and diligently for the poor and the disadvantaged. We should also work with unity and purpose to ensure that the benefits of government policies reach all sections of society.

India's future has to be built on the foundation of social protection of the economically and socially handicapped sections.

If you give everybody a good government job, there's no crime.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

Our motto should be: let us make peace so that we can concentrate on the really important work that needs to be done. That is, alleviating the plight of the poor and the defenceless, for as long as most of humanity feels the pain of poverty we all remain prisoners.

Tomorrow, I'm going to a soup kitchen in Mobile. I think that will symbolize the insensitivity of this administration to human needs.

While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.

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.

I fear very much for our kids, for low income people and for seniors.

If the economy is growing fast, there is call for a distributing income from the rich to the poor to to put in place social safety nets.

Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens-to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one-and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines.

I feel good when I'm engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what's happening to poor folks in this society.

The test is always how we treat the poor.

We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished.

This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them!

I do not share the general view that market forces are the basis for political liberty. Every time I see a homeless person living in a cardboard box in London, I see that person as a victim of market forces. Everytime I see a pensioner who cannot manage, I know that he is a victim of market forces

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

Once upon a time, the most successful Democratic leader of them all, FDR, looked south and said I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill clad, ill nourished. Today our national Democratic leaders look south and say, I see one third of a nation and it can go to hell.

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.