Denis Diderot Quotes

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.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.

There is no reason, in the capital city of the richest country in the world, for anybody to be hungry.

People might not protest for overtly political or social causes, but when they can't feed themselves and their family, they will take to the streets.

There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

There are corporations worth billions of dollars—and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

In our great cities there is plainly in evidence much wealth contrasted with much poverty and some of the wealth has been acquired or is used in a manner for which there is no moral justification.

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?

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

A nonviolent system of government is clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists.

Why do some people have to go barefoot so that others can drive luxury cars? Why are some people able to live only 35 years in order that others can live 70 years? Why do some people have to be miserably poor in order that others can be extravagantly rich? I speak for all the children in the world who don't even have a piece of bread.

there is ten times more in the world than would maintain all in yet unknown luxury. Yet how much misery there is in our midst; not because there is not enough, but owing to the misdirection of it.

It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence.

In America, we have freedom of choice. But some are free to choose between Lamborghini and Rolls Royce while others are free to choose which dumpster they're going to have their meal out of next. Some are free to choose which, you know, homes and farms to foreclosed on, while others choose which bridge they're going to sleep under tonight.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

India happens to be a rich country inhabited by very poor people.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

Poverty is unnecessary.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.