Quotes About Inequality

Yes, I think bitterly, that's how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don't dare to ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course.

As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar.

Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?

no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker's wagon No. 5, ask, "Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?" For

Marxism, however, is not primarily a theory of class structure; it is above all a theory of class struggle.

Religion is the opium of the poor

I don't know who made the laws; But I know there ain't no law that you got to go hungry.

The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money.

Pobre todo el mundo —dijo Hadley—. Ricos los gatos que no tienen dinero.

lumpenproletariat.

Religion is the opium of the poor. I thought marijuana was the opium of the poor.

We've only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years -- I think this is worth writing about. I think we've made tremendous sacrifices, we've shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.

Why?" I kept on asking myself. "Why? Who is this boy and why?" I knew that white men bonded colored boys out of jail for a few hundred dollars and worked them until they had gotten all their money back two and three times over. But I was trying to figure out why Marshall Hebert would do this when he already had more people than he needed. Now I knew. This little old lady had the finger on him, too.

They had chopped wood here too; then they were gone. Gone to the fields, the small towns, the cities – where they died. There was always news coming back to the quarter about someone who had been killed or who had been sent to prison for killing someone else: Snowball, stabbed to death in a nightclub in Port Allen; Claudee, killed by a woman in New Orleans; Smitty, sent to the state penitentiary for manslaughter. And there were others who did not go anywhere but simply died slower

For de small stealing dey puts you in jail, soon or late. But for de big stealing dey puts yo' picture in de paper and yo' statue in de Hall of Fame when you croaks! If dey's one thing I learned in ten years, listenin' to de white quality on de Pullman cars, it's dat same fact. And when I gets a chance to use it -- from stowaway to Emperor in two years. Dat's goin' some!

I mean supposing we—the self-satisfied, successful members of society—are responsible for the injustice visited upon the heads of our less fortunate "brothers-in­Christ" because of our shameful indifference to it. We see misery all around us and we do not care. We do nothing to prevent it. Are we not then, in part at least, responsible for it? Have you ever thought of that?

Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake

The great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

Future generations would solve the material inequalities in the sex lives of men and women by means of birth control and abortion. Through the miracle of science, a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for their pleasure without consequence or attachment. And, should the medication fail, she is free to have doctors kill the child in her womb and drag it out in pieces to be sold for profit and used for medical experimentation.

The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes.

It is a sequence familiar in the capitals of other great empires: the extreme inequality created as loot from abroad pours in; the corruption of voting systems and of representative institutions; hoarse cries for change from the streets; the undertow of violence; the mailed fist as the army strides in to 'clean things up'. The imbalance of power created by empire, unbalances the empire itself.