Quote

In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works a full time job should have to live in poverty. That's a fundamental value proposition, an article of faith in our country that I know an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

There are cultural reasons, economic competitiveness reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people are in poverty. The difference today is that increasingly they are in perpetual poverty.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

There's a lot of freedom in having nothing. You don't have responsibility. You have nobody to answer to. But I'd rather deal without the poverty.

Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.