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.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

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

What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

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.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

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.

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.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.

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

I believe that if you have revolutionary potential, you must make the world a better place and use 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.

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

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.

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

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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.

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

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.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.

The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

The people are hungry: It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes.

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

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

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

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

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.

Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that’s been discriminated against, knows what it’s like.

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

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

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

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.

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

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.

Capitalism has proven to be the only system that works, but the problem with capitalism is that extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people.

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.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

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

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.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

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.

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

Civil disobedience’s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

I believe we live in a love-starved society. Everywhere you go there are probably people who haven’t had the right kind of love in their lives.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

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.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

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.