You know, if I listened to Michael Dukakis long enough, I would be convinced we’re in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going without food and medical attention and that we’ve got to do something about the unemployed.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn’t available.

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

Today, the news is scandals; that is news, but the many children who don’t have food – that’s not news. This is grave. We can’t rest easy while things are this way.

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

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

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.

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

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

Violence has been Nicaragua’s most important export to the world.

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.

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.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

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

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

All I can say is I am sensitive to discrimination on any basis because I have experienced that upset.

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.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

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.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

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

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

I still have my unemployment books and I remember when I worked for the sanitation department and the post office.

It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.

I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people.

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.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

I’ve been actually really very pleased to see how much awareness was raised around bullying, and how deeply it affects everyone. You know, you don’t have to be the loser kid in high school to be bullied. Bullying and being picked on comes in so many different forms.

The white man is destroying the world.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

I don’t think the Tea Party people are racist, except maybe a tiny portion of them. But there has been a deliberate effort – again, referring to Fox Broadcasting – to inject the race issue into it. They have actually called Obama a racist on television.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

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

I was not an activist.

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

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

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

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

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

A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today’s military rejects include tomorrow’s hard-core unemployed.

No one is pro-abortion.

As I said last week in the wake of the grand jury decision, I think Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.