Social Justice Quotes

To some of us, hunger was more academic than real, but we must try to develop the ability to feel the urgency of such a situation.

As I got older, then my particular ambitions started cohering around creating a world in which people of different races or backgrounds or faiths can recognize each other's humanity, or creating a world in which every kid, regardless of their background, can strive and achieve and fulfill their potential.

Abject poverty is demeaning, is an assault on the dignity of those that suffer it. In the end it demeans us all. It makes the freedom of all of us less meaningful.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Let us disperse from our aloofness and serve the weak who made us strong, and cleanse the country in which we live. Let us teach this miserable nation to smile and rejoice with heaven's bounty and glory of life and freedom.

Labour is a great leveler of all distinctions.

Certain rich men, whose lives are evil and corrupt, are the representatives of predatory wealth accumulated by all forms of inequity, from the oppression of wage workers to unfair methods of crushing out competition.

The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required - not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

If you have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is to convince yourself that the person is subhuman. And won't mind the enslavement. The second thing you must do is convince your allies that the person is subhuman so that you have some support. But the third and the unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he, she, is not quite a first class citizen.

It is our duty to create a social milieu in which the young and the socially weak feel that the present and future belong to them.

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

It is time for the next generations to continue our struggle against social injustice and for the rights of humanity. It is in your hands.

I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

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

A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.

My soul refuses to be satisfied so long as it is a helpless witness of a single wrong or a single misery.

I'm not trying to get power over white. I'm involved in a freedom struggle. Not a power struggle.

In teaching there should be no distinction of classes.

When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.

We are too near the scene of tragedy to realize that this canker or untouchability has traveled far beyond its prescribed limits and has sapped the very foundation of the whole nation.

There is no 'as far as possible' on the question of untouchability. If it is to go, it must go in its entirety from the temples as from everywhere else.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.

If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

The world has also learned that economic growth, by itself, cannot close the gap between rich and poor.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn't it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived?

We must also know that even before liberation in 1994 there [in South Africa] were people with resources who tried to share with those who were deprived.

There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.

Boxing is a stepping stone just to introduce me to the audience. If I was still in Louisville, Kentucky and never was a boxer I still might get killed next week in some kind of freedom struggle and you'd ever hear the news.

Instead of being satisfied to alleviate suffering, we shall labor hard and continually to prevent it.

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?

Go back to - my first campaign for the United States Senate. I got a bunch of people now talking about inequality. But back then they sure weren't. Back then, folks were saying I was preaching class warfare. Now it's suddenly their campaign platform.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Lofty talk about 'social justice' or 'fairness' boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income - and are far more dangerous.

Harriet Tubman lived to see the harvest.

You can't comfort the afflicted with afflicting the comfortable.

Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

Why are they picking on boxing? It's because the black men are so superior in boxing that they want to stop it. Well, the black man's so hungry he's got to fight.

There is no color line in death. I swear to the lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath - America will be! I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

A hungry mob is an angry mob.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

If you're a sexist, racist, homophobe, or basically an asshole, don't buy this CD. I don't care if you like me, I hate you.

I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.

You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can't be entertained - or people who are afraid. You can't entertain a man who has no food.

In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.

Being attentive to inequality and not tone deaf to it. But offering prescriptions that are actually going to help folks in communities that feel forgotten. That's going to be our most important strategy. And I think we can successfully do that.

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

When we see that our problem is so complicated and so all-encompassing in its intent and content, then we realize that it is no longer a Negro problem, confined only to the American Negro; that it is no longer an American problem, confined only to America, but it is a problem for humanity.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Whatever success I have achieved, whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy, the special obligation I felt as a black man like you to help those who need it most, people who didn't have the opportunities that I had because there, but for the grace of God go I. I might have been in their shoes. I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family. And that motivates me.

Let us give practical recognition to the injustices of the past,by building a future based on equality&social justice

If everybody lives by the sweat of his brow, the earth will become a paradise.

If we must grind up human flesh and bones in the industrial machine that we call modern America, then, before God, I assert that those who consume the coal and you and I who benefit from that service, because we live in comfort, we owe protection to those men first and we owe security for their families if they die.