There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand – demand – demand change.

In school, many of us procrastinate and then successfully cram for tests. We get the grades and degrees we need to get the jobs we want, even if we fail to get a good general education.

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.

Policy makers who have never served in the military continue to use the military to lead social change in this country.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

It’s a facet of the gay rights movement that people don’t think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn’t until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana’s ‚head and master rule,‘ that the husband was head and master of the house.

The women of my generation and my daughter’s generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

I’d be more frightened by not using whatever abilities I’d been given. I’d be more frightened by procrastination and laziness.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

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.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

You can rebel in different ways. Civil disobedience is rebelling. As long as it’s peaceful, of course.

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.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be… The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

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

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

I love the women’s movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I have all the admiration in the world for somebody like Bono, who really puts himself on the line and tries actively to do something about our world situation.

Do I worry about being in the public eye and raising kids? Yeah. Any situation you’re in, you’re gonna worry about raising kids. But it’s champagne problems, too. There are people who can’t feed their kids.

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

I’m trying to make the world a more open place.

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.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

So people are talking about revolution. What a revolution it would be to have a woman president.

I tried to be a serious student and not procrastinate, but I was still somebody that would be described as somebody who liked to have fun, too, and go to the occasional party – or two or three.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

If you’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

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

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Demographics show that we are entering a battle between young and old. I call it the ‚Age War.‘ The young want to hang onto their money to grow their families, businesses, and wealth. The old want the tax and investment dollars of the young to sustain their old age.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

I don’t mind living in a man’s world as long as I can be a woman in it.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

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.