Quotes About Inequality

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

Aveva vinto, ma non si sentiva vincitore. Era riuscito a raddrizzare il corso della propria esistenza, ma si sentiva più che mai vittima dell'indifferenza del mondo. Non sembrava giusto.

For all our fights, there was no getting around the fact that Carrie wasn't fooled by show and she regarded most of the world around her as a show for the rich at the expense of the poor.

When we hear people saying they can't believe in a God who gets angry—yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply? What kind of God wouldn't get angry at a financial scheme that robs thousands of people of their life savings?

Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; "a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor

The city's West Side was a gigantic slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, who were paid, Gunther says, "probably the lowest wages in the United States"—for pecan shellers (San Antonio was the "Pecan Capital of the World") an average of $1.75 per week.

We have to do something about this hate, and you have to get to the root of hate. The roots are poverty and disease and illiteracy.

People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.

I pity the poverty of your wealth.

Everybody is equal. Everybody! That's the law. They are? Only from on top.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

vÅ¡echny systémy', dokonce i takzvané 'neohrani?ené demokracie' vylu?ovaly z ob?anství ne ménÄ› než ?tvrtinu své populace v d?sledku vÄ›ku, narození, danÄ› z hlavy, kriminálního rejstÃ…â"¢íku nebo dalÅ¡ího.

Whoring is like military service, Ira—okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.

Dominance of males over females seems to be one of the symptoms.

The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning.

know. I've been in classes with her. She's bright, but she's screwed up. Jesus, they're so miserable, those kids, always so goddamn unhappy about racism and sexism and imperialism and militarism and capitalism. Man, I grew up in a tarpaper house in Fayette, Mississippi, with ten other kids. We were trying to stay alive; we didn't have time to be that goddamn unhappy.

Finally it was probably less the poverty that bred crime than the sour stench of racism that hung over anyplace where people are separated out by kind.

The rich really are very different," Tyler Costigan was saying. "Especially if they are also unscrupulous." ... "They have always gotten what they wished, and after a while they think they are supposed to. If they have a problem they hire someone to solve it. And they become ever more contemptuous of people who cannot. They even become contemptuous of people who have problems. And eventually they are contemptuous of everyone and care only about what they want.

Hey, we've got this guy, Dan! He's ours!" Dan Tomsic stared at her with the disdain he reserved for shitbirds, defense attorneys, and card-carrying members of the ACLU. He said, "It's easier to cut off your own goddamned leg than convict a rich man in this state, detective. Haven't you been around long enough to know that?

Check the list of the world's most feeble economies and note the high proportion that are landlocked. 20 Note how tropical countries (those located between 23.45 degrees north and south latitudes) are generally poor, even as most high-income countries are in the middle and high latitudes.

The middle class for a long time now has been slowly dissolving into a working class precariously on the verge of slipping into outright poverty, and also in the other direction into a smaller, upper-middle, global elite.

Living in poor neighborhoods remains almost always a high-risk factor for disorder, suboptimal parenting, and adverse child development. Similarly, neighborhood poverty is known to have deleterious health effects. For example, obesity is systematically worse in poor neighborhoods.

In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.