“The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

“Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.”

“In the 1950’s this America worried about itself, yet even its anxieties were products of abundance. . . Now the American city has been transformed. The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the central areas, but are increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else. . . . [T]he poor are politically invisible. It is one of the cruelest ironies of social life in advanced countries that the dispossessed at the bottom of society are unable to speak for themselves. The people of the other America do not, by far and large, belong to unions, to fraternal organizations, or to political parties. They are without lobbies of their own; they put forward no legislative program. As a group, they are atomized. They have no face; they have no voice . . .”

-Source: Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962