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.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

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.

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.

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.

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

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.

I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

It’s always going to be a fight for anyone who isn’t an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn’t have a fight.

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

I’ve been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

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.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

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.

The Nation of Islam’s main focus was teaching black pride and self-awareness. Why should we keep trying to force ourselves into white restaurants and schools when white people didn’t want us? Why not clean up our own neighborhoods and schools instead of trying to move out of them and into white people’s neighborhoods?

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

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.

I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody’s ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the ‚n‘ word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to belittle other folks because they weren’t pretty or they weren’t rich or they weren’t clever.

Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world’s poorest people.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

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

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

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

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

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

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin‘ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.

We can’t afford not to educate girls and give women the power and the access that they need.

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

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

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.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

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.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn’t in her.

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

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.

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

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.

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

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

Who, being loved, is poor?

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

Most poor people live in the poorest countries.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

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

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.

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

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.