Quotes About Inequality

shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being," but we are a society that values the anesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resources to live in padded, temperature-controlled environments that make few demands on our bodies or our minds. We come up with elaborate means of not knowing about the suffering of others and of blaming them when we do.

The white man knows how to make everything," he said, "but he does not know how to distribute it.

The dirty little secret is that the pool man, who's making $30 000 a year, is subsidizing the million-dollar mortgage for the family whose pool he cleans. No wonder people want to get rid of tax breaks for corporate jets.

If we seized all the assets of the eighty-five wealthiest people in the world to make a fund to give annually to the poorest half, it would raise their spending power by less than 10 cents a day.

the much-maligned "capitalism" has raised the real income per person of the poorest since 1800 not by 10 percent or 100 percent, but by over 3,000 percent.

The left in its worrying routinely forgets this most important secular event since the invention of agriculture—the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries—and goes on worrying and worrying, like the little dog worrying about his bone in the Travelers Insurance advertisement on TV, in a new version every half generation or so.

I had learned firsthand from my first release from prison that living-wage-paying jobs and black ex-felons don't go together in America. (I specifically say black ex-felons because studies have shown that white male ex-felons oftentimes have better paying job prospects and offers than blacks males with clean records or even college degrees. 4)

México. Riqueza descomunal y pobreza desgarradora.

at rude variance with the poverty of its surroundings.

We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction.

Sympathy's easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

One of the interesting dichotomies of life is that the poor people are invariably very generous, and the rich people are the real cheapskates.

Hebzucht heeft geen kleur.

Who's going to rob a black man on a bicycle?

c) attaining a racially color-blind society is unattainable and only reinforces racism and societal inequality.

African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans were second-class-status Americans. They were seldom welcomed and were told to stay in their place and not allowed into the mainstream culture of the privileged even when fully acculturated.

The irrational sense of entitlement is a dominant feature of White privilege (McIntosh, 2002).

There is a triple purpose to the existence of White privilege: (1) to advantage White Americans, (2) to disadvantage persons of color, and (3) to attribute causes to individual deficiencies, thereby relieving White society of responsibility for perpetuating inequality.

Third, many describe an emotional exhaustion of having to constantly deal with a never-ending onslaught of microaggressions and being placed in a no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation.

When the infernal machine of plantation slavery began to grind its wheels, iron laws of economics came into play, laws that would lead to immeasurable suffering but would also, and equally inevitably, produce new languages all over the world – languages that ironically, in the very midst of man's inhumanity to man, demonstrated the essential unity of humanity.

Poverty and lack of knowledge must be challenged.

Let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do — let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work.

Historic changes and challenges. Breakthroughs in human knowledge and opportunity. And yet, for vast numbers across the globe, the daily realities have not altered.

But knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.