Nelson Rockefeller Quotes

More combat planes, missiles and soldiers won't provide additional bread for our families, desks for our schools, or medicine for our clinics.

Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.

The goal of my work is to help assure that we can create a world of abundance in which we meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child.

If we can spend the money to put a man on the moon, we ought to be able to find the funds to put a man on his feet.

We are living in a time when the comforts of life, and all the material wealth needed to bring happiness to every human being, can be produced in abundance. There is no need whatever for one human being to go hungry, homeless or naked. Man’s inventive genius has developed the tool to that point, and guided the natural forces to that degree, that abundance is possible to all.

The government can build physical infrastructure in the form of housing for the poorest of the poor, and availability of energy, toilets and water in every home.

An economy growing at 7 percent per year, can and must find the resources to improve the lives of its millions of poor.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

When a country wants television more than they want clean water, they've lost their grip.

The ultimate purpose of economics, of course, is to understand and promote the enhancement of well-being.

To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that's just a little bit too much to ask.

Shouldn't everybody join hands to give the basic minimum - food, education and health - to the entire population?

Bend everything toward improving the standard of living of the people.

I know the Rich will oppose this; but the Richest Men are not always most beneficial to the Commonwealth, Men of Projecting Brains do most good to their Neighbours, for tho' they often hurt themselves by their Projects, yet others reap the benefit of them, and so the Publick is not hurt but helped by them, and I presume none will deny but that this Town hath been more advantaged by some Men now in it of mean Estates, then ever they were by the Richest Men in it

Usually, so far as improvement in the people's economic conditions is concerned, humanitarians simply play the role of the busybody.

Destroy poverty, that source of crime, by assuring to each the satisfaction of all needs! And how difficult is this to achieve?

If we can afford tremendous sums of money to win the war, we can afford to invest whatever amount it takes to win the peace

The seven basic, essential goods and services, Food, Clothing, Shelter, Transportation, Protection, Tools, and (special) Education.

No doubt we have to have bigger projects, bigger industries, basic industries, but it is a matter of the highest importance that we look to the common man, the weakest element in the society.

I would rather my constituents were warm and prosperous than cold and impoverished as we are overtaken by emerging markets who understandably put people before polar bears.

Beyond advocating for greater access to consumer markets abroad, we need to go one step further and advocate for a higher quality of life for the people who are the driving force behind them.

When we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help.

I have always believed that the ultimate purpose of economic policies and development policy is to meet the basic needs of our people. And for that, we need a fast-expanding economy.

The existence of poverty in the US should not be accepted as a necessary evil or insoluble problem, but should be considered a crisis requiring emergency measures. It is a matter of will and priorities, not a matter of resources.

Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.