“The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can now be abolished. How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer? How long?”

Source: The Other America (1962), p. 170

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can now be abolished. How long shall we ignore this underde…" by Michael Harrington?
Michael Harrington photo
Michael Harrington 17
American political writer 1928–1989

Related quotes

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall over, come.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, The American Promise (1965)
Context: For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future. This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall over, come.

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“Let us therefore continue our triumphal march to the realization of the American dream…. for all of us today, the battle is in our hands… The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions… We are still in for the season of suffering… How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever… our God is marching on.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Speech on the steps of the State Capitol Building, Montgomery, Alabama (25 March 1965), as transcribed from a tape recording; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this speech was not reported in its entirety.
1960s

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Henry Ford photo
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo

“For too long, we have allowed fear to dictate our politics and suspicions, to shape how we perceive other communities.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Excerpts from a speech at the launch of the NAP, 8 April 2005

“How shall we venture home?
How shall we tell each other of the poet?”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

"The Gates"
The Gates (1976)
Context: How shall we venture home?
How shall we tell each other of the poet?
How can we meet the judgment on the poet,
or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run?
All those beginning to run?

Kwame Nkrumah photo
Jonathan Safran Foer photo

Related topics