Poverty
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Fighting poverty as a personal and political imperative
Tags Share According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond, poverty is more than an income level. It’s a lived experience – one that often strips individuals of their inherent dignity. “Poverty isn’t a line, it’s a constellation of social maladies and humiliations,” he said. “It’s the eviction notice, the debt collectors blowing up your phone,…
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Address at the University College of Buffalo Commencement, Buffalo, New York
Around the world— from the straits of Magellan to the straits of Malacca, from the Nile Delta to the Amazon basin, in Jaipur and Johannesburg—
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Remarks to medical students on federally subsidized healthcare
The students fired off questions challenging Kennedy on medical care for the poor, which they characterized as too expensive, unnecessary, or best left to the marketplace. Ultimately a student asked, “Where are you going to get all the money for these federally subsidized programs you’re talking about?”
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Address at the New York State Association of Towns, New York City
All around us is evidence of the urban crisis of our time. The streets are clogged with traffic. The air is heavy with smoke. Our water is in short supply. And a short subway ride on almost any line— when the subways are running— will bring us to the crowded slums of the city, to…
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Senate Speech
The war on poverty, like it or not, is the single outstanding commitment this nation has made to the principle that poverty must be abolished.
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Address at the Third Annual WGHQ Human Relations Award Dinner, Ellenville, New York
Talking is not enough. But it is a beginning. We might do better than turning our backs in embarrassed anger when spokesmen for the poor blast the social structure that has left them out.
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Address at Kentucky’s Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Freedom Hall, Louisville, Kentucky
The dilemma of poverty faced by the society and the polity is the gap between expectations and reality. Great expectations were the creation, not of idle political promises, but of the country itself and its history.
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Speech at the Law Day Exercises of the University of Georgia Law School, Athens, Georgia
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress who cannot help themselves.
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Address at the Greater Utica Chamber of Commerce, Utica, New York
Poverty leads to crime, to lowered general prosperity, to higher municipal costs and a lower tax base; and where it causes early school dropouts, broken families, and the shattering loss of hope itself, poverty is self-perpetuating and self-gene
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Remarks Delivered Introducing Bill for Industrial Investment in Urban Poverty Areas, US Senate
The greatest failure in our existing anti-poverty efforts is the failure to involve and rely on the private enterprise system which is the basic strength of the nation. We have created for the poor a separate economy, almost a separate nation: a second-rate system of welfare handouts, a screen of government agency is keeping the…
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Speech at the Dedication of the John F. Kennedy Interfaith Chapel at West Georgia College in Carrollton, Georgia
Opportunity denied or opportunity delayed—often one and the same—is not a question of color. One-tenth of our population is Negro. But a much larger portion of our total population, closer to one-fifth, is poor.
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