Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

My mission is to eradicate poverty.

The Curse of poverty has no justification in our age...The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

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.

The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

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

There's enough wealth in the world that no one should go without.

Can we not wage a war and emerge victorious against poverty. Let us defeat poverty.

Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.

Bush senior used to say that we have more will than wallet. So he urged the country to attack poverty with a thousand points of light, none of which could be eaten.

we're focusing too much energy on the symptom rather than the disease: Our real enemy is poverty, not welfare.

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.

In an era of global abundance, our world has the resources to reduce dramatically the massive divides that persist between rich and poor, if only those resources can be unleashed in the service of all peoples.

The biggest fight in my life is not in boxing. The biggest fight in my life is how to end poverty in my country.

Eradicate poverty. This is all that matters in my country. When I am out training I think about this a lot; when I am running it is going over in my mind. As a country we cannot move forward until we eradicate poverty.

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

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

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

Can You Fight Poverty With A Five-Star Hotel?

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

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.