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.

Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn’t work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

I’m substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

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

In 1979, Iranians carried out an illegitimate act: They overthrew a tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path, not following U.S. orders.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

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.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

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

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

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

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead – they call us.

The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States – and war is what they got.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

The United States never stopped conspiring against the Arab world, which holds the largest oil reserves on the planet.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

It isn’t enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, ‚How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?‘

When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, our island was a true Yankee colony. The United States had duped and disarmed our Liberation Army. One couldn’t speak of developed agriculture, but of immense plantations exploited on the base of manual and animal labour that in general used neither fertilizers nor machinery.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

My family kinda hit the skids. We were experiencing poverty at that point. We all got a job, where the whole family had to work as security guards and janitors. And I just got angry.

If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – meaning primarily the United States – come down to two fundamental issues: ‚What are the accepted and applicable ‚rules of world order,‘ and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?‘

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system – at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.

Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That’s a statement in and of itself.

The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced – the just demands of peace and security will be met – or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

I think one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.

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.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Every country must be absolutely free to adopt the type of economic, political and social system that it considers convenient.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

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.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing… you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn’t affect two-thirds of the people of the world.