Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That’s not possible on $1 a day.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

Guns are bad, I tell you.

Corruption is just another form of tyranny.

Nigeria has moved into low-middle-income, but their north is very poor, and the health care systems there have broken down.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.

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.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

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.

I think where political issues invade moral situations, spiritual leaders have to speak out.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

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

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

Sexism is everywhere, bro. I don’t know if it’s ever not somewhere.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

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.

Our veterans who fall on hard times and find themselves without a home deserve more than just handwringing or kind words. They deserve real help that gets them back on their feet.

The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them.

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.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

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

It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.

We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

I like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

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

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I’m not ashamed of anything.

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

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.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

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.

I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.

I am no supporter of factory labor for children, but I have never joined with those who clamored against proper work of children on farms outside their school hours.

I was not an activist.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.