20 important modern social liberal quotes

I thought I would put together 20 great quotes to inspire today's modern social liberals. 

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

~John F. Kennedy

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” 

~Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

“The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”

~Robert Kennedy

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

~Abraham Lincoln

“I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

“To impose taxes when the public exigencies require them is an obligation of the most sacred character, especially with a free people.”

~James Monroe

“I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.”

~Thomas Jefferson

“In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

~Thomas Jefferson

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

“It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

“If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor.”

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

“It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

~Hubert H. Humphrey

“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”

~Hubert Humphrey

 “Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt