Ben Bernanke Quotes

Let's take care of the necessities first: give people jobs, and find a way to get us out of poverty.

We have become stronger economically; we have been successfully resolving the social problems, raising the level of living - the standards of living - of the population.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.'

Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history. For some reason that simple truth has evaded everybody.

You must not embark on programs to curb economic growth without placing a priority on maintaining income, so that the poorest people won’t simply be further depressed in their condition but will have a share, and be able to live decently.

More people in more countries, both developing and developed, have experienced larger increases in living standards than in any prior fifty year period.

Having practical proposals that improve people's economic lives is where it's all about in Ohio, and that's what we're focused on.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

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.

People everywhere in the world are hungry for economic opportunity. And it's about a lot more than being able to make money.

Our goals for this nation must be nothing less than to double the size of our economy and bring prosperity and jobs, ownership and equality of opportunity to all Americans, especially those living in our nation's pockets of poverty.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

My vision for Kentucky is a Commonwealth where there is so much economic opportunity, and our quality of life is so high, that people who are born here can stay here, and people who aren't fortunate enough to be born in Kentucky, can look forward to locating here.

Our goal is to upgrade the life of China's middle class. We all want to live better.

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

Ultimately, your economy has to be measured in the real eyes of real people, not simply in statistics that appear in newspapers about the unemployment rate and so forth.

Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some.

For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class.

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.

Society’s willingness to provide for the poor among them increases when the standard of living is advancing.

Reducing poverty is in our own interest.

Because there can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity, liberalism carries a heavy responsibility in fighting continuously to expand our economy.

We don't want to saw off the first rung of the economic ladder.