Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

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.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.

We cannot wait any longer to deal with the structural causes of poverty, in order to heal our society from an illness that can only lead to new crises.

I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

The thing about Occupy is that the sentiment the movement embodies is timeless: Don't be greedy, share.

My mission is to eradicate poverty.

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

After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.

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.

As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

We do not yet have a politics that is equal to the economics around us.

Can You Fight Poverty With A Five-Star Hotel?

We are sorry for the hungry, enough to give them food, but not sorry enough to tackle the CAUSES which make hunger possible. We are sorry for the unemployed, but not sorry enough to shoulder the job of abolishing unemployment by means of A NEW AND DARING INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM.

Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?

When you question this war on poverty, you get all the criticisms from adherents to the status quo who just don't want to see anything change. We got to have the courage to face that down, just as we did in the welfare reform of the late 1990s, and if we succeeded, we can help resuscitate this culture and get people back to work.

One of the great conundrums in philanthropy globally is that the way wealth creation happens itself often creates the inequities in society.

This should be the message of Occupy Wall Street: We just want a chance; our government needs to give us a chance.

I was always clear that I didn't want to just do pure charity. My thinking was definitely about looking at the levers in society that will change the system of inequity, not one person's misfortune.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.