It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn’t available.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

Hunger is the best pickle.

There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.

The bottom line on the Hyde Amendment is that it is directly, in effect, targeting poor women and women who don’t have money.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren’t the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can’t be entertained – or people who are afraid. You can’t entertain a man who has no food.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

I’ll never, ever be full. I’ll always be hungry. Obviously, I’m not talking about food. Growing up, I had nothing for such a long time. Someone told me a long time ago, and I’ve never forgotten it, ‚Once you’ve ever been hungry, really, really hungry, then you’ll never, ever be full.‘

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

Homophobia is real in this country.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Ridiculous yachts and private planes and big limousines won’t make people enjoy life more, and it sends out terrible messages to the people who work for them. It would be so much better if that money was spent in Africa – and it’s about getting a balance.

I was not an activist.

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

No one is pro-abortion.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Today, the news is scandals; that is news, but the many children who don’t have food – that’s not news. This is grave. We can’t rest easy while things are this way.

Something’s very wrong with a nation that would rather spend money on war than take care of its children.

I don’t think there is a single social issue I haven’t spoken on.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Let’s be clear about this, and let’s be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

Racism and sexism, misogyny and homophobia, they’re so visible. They’re out in the open. When they’re visible, it’s a lot easier to deal with them.