Whoopi Goldberg Quotes

Homelessness is a part of our American system. There should be nothing wrong with this condition as long as the individual is not sentenced to unnecessary suffering and punishment.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan, or Jamaica. But really, there's enough to share, when you check it. It's not that complicated, really. It's probably less thinking and more feeling that's required.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

Well, my view before was a Western view, and I certainly understand marriage equality and civil rights, equal rights for all, but having visited developing nations and some of the poorest nations in the world, I realize how deep it goes and how much work really needs to be done to create equality for all.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

The difference of the degrees in which the individuals of a great community enjoy the good things of life has been a theme of declaration and discontent in all ages.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.

Just because you are poor and have no voice does not mean that you don’t deserve police protection.

How can you worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?

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.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

Communism will never be defeated by atomic bombs or nuclear weapons.... Our greatest defense against Communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice and righteousness.... We must ... seek to remove ... conditions of poverty, insecurity, injustice, and racial discrimination.

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

What I am interested in is to help this grand President of ours feed the hungry and clothe the naked and provide work for the idle of every race and creed

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

Economic inequality is not about food stamps and homeless shelters. It is about being a devotee of social justice and equality.

All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they're in the same boat. They've got no economic opportunities.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

The same way I'm not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I'm also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.