Quotes About Inequality

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

Men get laid, but women get screwed.

All laws, indeed, are made for the poor; the rich observe them more in their breach.

Foolish people hate scholars due to envy; so they ill-treat them. On account of envy only, lazy and poor people develop enmity towards the affluent.

The platter could probably sate four starving Ethiopians into a crapulous state.

There are a few places on the East Coast, and maybe Los Angeles, where women understand evening gowns. The rest of the country still has far to go.

Women lose their delicacy and refinement, when they are compelled night and day to haggle with their destiny over things pitifully small, and for this they are blamed by those whom their toil supports.

Money is a country all its own.

I'm into looking at things from the other point of view. And if you look at who votes in the Oscars, mostly older Jewish guys, they're going to vote for stuff they relate to. Do they relate to NWA? I doubt it.

The Clintons use black people for votes but then don't do anything for black communities after they're elected. They use us for photo ops.

Neither one of the parties is doing anything for poor people. They're both full of it. Black people have been voting Democratic their whole life, and they're still poor. And the Republicans don't do anything for poor people, either.

A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father's generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.

Inequality was written into the creation of the American Republic when our Founding Fathers denied voting rights to women.

Another example of the educational inequality is the current debate over publicly financed school vouchers which will provide educational opportunities to a privileged handful, but deprive public schools of desperately needed resources.

I would take vouchers, do sums in my head just to get some eggs and bread or a tin of cheap Irish stew. I'd be starving and want two tins but couldn't afford it. The poorer you are the hungrier you feel.

In the industry, artists of of color struggle the most. Caucasian artists have really solidified themselves in the industry, and with African Americans now we see directors and producers who vow to only produce work that shines a light on African American artists. But everybody in the middle gets lost.

When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks.

When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel - it's vulgar.

I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel - it's vulgar.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don't get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

People on the lower rungs are more vulnerable to sexual harassment than those at the top.

We live on a planet of limited resources - an abstract notion for some of the world's population, but for many of the poorest and most vulnerable, those limits are all too real.