Quotes About Society

We tend to admire the people in our society who have accumulated such wealth as to seem somehow great. But we shouldn't forget that it was the everyday working class man who made this country great.

Tax bills create wealth. They help people live better.

I think that something is fundamentally wrong if a person of his great wealth is only paying 13.9 percent effective tax rate and most of Americans are paying 28, 30 percent and they make far less.

Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it's the greater wealth.

It's clear to me when you do private equity well, you're making companies more efficient and helping them grow and become more profitable. That success means our investors - such as public pension funds - benefit, which contributes to the economic wealth of society.

We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.

Building a road might create temporary jobs, but does it really create wealth if it doesn't also shorten commute times or otherwise make society better off?

Status based on wealth is an old-fashioned idea; I find it repugnant, actually.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

Liberals tend to be much more concerned about business and corporations as the oppressors. They look to government as the solution. On the Right it's the opposite. They see business as good, as what generates wealth in society, and they see government as the oppressor, which makes it hard for especially small businesspeople.

Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.

A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promoting that point.

Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals.

One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels.

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.

People of my generation in Portugal fell into the magic potion of political ideas. What was very funny about this revolution was that it did not bring wealth to the Portuguese. But it brought language, ideas. You'd go to the fish market, and all the women who were selling fish would call each other fascist, communist.

The question for Obama is how he can rein in the furies of populism while making us all feel the malefactors of great wealth are being sufficiently punished.

If one has been blessed or have been fortunate enough to have got much more than normal wealth, it is but natural that one expects a certain fiduciary responsibility in terms of how that wealth is applied, used and leveraged for purposes of society.

The road system that we've come to depend on, the road system that we built our wealth on and our power on, is falling apart.

I wish the city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth.

Given that all our lives rest on work that defines us, the business of labor, the wealth that work manifests itself to, I find it odd that not much is written about it. We talk about relationships, damage, adultery, revolution, but we don't talk about work.

Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves.