Jim Wallis Quotes

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Hunger could not exist but through violation of economic laws and fundamental principles of social justice.

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

Although black and white Americans live, work, and learn together now, there is still injustice in America.

Disenfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

The hungry and homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care for cultural heritage.

In the 19th century, some people looked at the condition of slavery and said that it was monstrous and unconscionable; that it must be abolished. ... Today the condition of hunger in a world of plenty is equally monstrous and unconscionable and it too must be abolished. We must become the 'new abolitionists'.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

Why should blacks feel elated about seeing men walk on the moon when millions of poor blacks and whites don't have enough money to buy food to eat on earth?

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

There is no excuse for inaction in the face of economic injustice.

I think, for me, the biggest issue is poverty in general, poverty in this time of plenty. It's reflected in homelessness. It's reflected in educational gaps. It's reflected in racial disparities.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.

Our great country is rich and abundant in so many ways. It is totally unacceptable to me that we have children and families going hungry!

We cannot exist as a little island of well-being in a world where two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry every night.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

We continue to blame the poor for their own condition. They are lazy. We do not want to know that the poorest of the poor are toddlers under three years of age.

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.

There are teachers in the United States who cry in the daytime because they see a child or children who haven't eaten properly, children who haven't used soap in so long.