Jesse Jackson Quotes

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

We used to wage war on poverty—not poor people.

We will not rest until this war [on poverty] is won.

Even the best community organizations and faith-based initiatives and the extraordinary charity of Americans across the country can't carry the brunt of eliminating poverty.

The best social programs we've had in this country are those that have united the middle class and the poor.

The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.... We ... today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.... We shall soon ... be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

… poor people deserve access to food, education, housing, and medical services

Let’s make the poor richer.

Prohibiting Poverty

I have to address the economic conditions of everybody, including, and perhaps first, those who are poor.

The poor don't want some small life. They don't want to game the system. They want to contribute, and they want to thrive. But poverty reduces people born for better things.

As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it, the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.

Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance to those who have much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. This reconciliation package fails that test as well.

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don't starve. Those are values, too.

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

Poverty must be reduced not only for reasons of moral and justice, but also of security.

The issues that matter to me are the social safety nets for people, health care, middle-class concerns. We need to take care of the middle class and the poor in our country.

There was never a war on poverty. Maybe there was a skirmish on poverty.

Trickle-down theories do not address the legitimate aspirations of the poor. We must lift those at the bottom so that poverty is erased from the dictionary of modern India.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.