Poverty Is ...

"The continuation of poverty is, of course, quite harmful to our society. Poverty is a major cause of crime and delinquency, it creates blight, it keeps millions of people from realizing their human potential and contributing fully to society, and it harms the economy by reducing real economic growth and tax revenues while increasing the cost of social programs. The social, political, and economic costs of poverty affect everyone and keep us from creating a more humane, productive, safe, and creative society." - Harrell R. Rodgers, Policy Analyst

Public Welfare

"Public welfare … must be more than a salvage operation, picking up the debris from the wreckage of human lives. Its emphasis must be directed increasingly toward prevention and rehabilitation - on reducing not only the long-range cost in budgetary terms but the long-range cost in human terms as well. Poverty weakens individuals and nations. Sounder public welfare policies will benefit the nation, its economy, its morale, and most importantly, its people." - John F. Kennedy

Of Squalor

"Neither misery nor squalor is inevitable so long as the people and government are one." - Lyndon B. Johnson

The Middle-Class

"One of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property, has undergone a profound change. In the older attitude, a certain sense of loving possessions existed between a man and his property. It grew on him. He was proud of it. He took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually he had to part from it because it could not be used any more. There is very little left of this sense of property today. One loves the newness of the thing bought, and is ready to betray it when something newer has appeared." - Erich Fromm, Social Pyschologist

Materialism

"Man today is fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better and especially new things. He is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite secondary. Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around ... in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little less privileged than he."  - Erich Fromm, Social Psychologist

In Society

   "We are surrounded by things of whose nature and origin we know nothing. ... We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manage or consume them. Our way of consumption necessarily results in the fact that we are never satisfied, since it is not our real concrete person which consumes a real and concrete thing. We thus develop an increasing need for more things, for more consumption. ... There is a legitimate need for more consumption as man develops culturally and has more refined needs for better food, objects or artistic pleasures, ect. But our craving for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of man. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give man a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force him into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to his economic ruin. With a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things - which enslave man." - Erich Fromm, Social Psychologist