Quotes About Inequality

People say the justice system is color-blind, but it isn't. It sees color, and it sees green. It will always see green. We like to think our courts are the great equalizer between the powerful and the powerless, but more times than not, money and power still prevail. To the Jack Devines of this world, Bennet wasn't the victim because in Jack Devine's way of thinking, everything was OK because he paid for it.

Injustice was not built of stone and mortar, or of metal. It was built of greed, inhumanity, and man's thirst for power.

People say the justice system is color-blind, but it isn't. It sees color, and it sees green. It will always see green. We like to think our courts are the great equalizer between the powerful and the powerless, but more times than not, money and power still prevail.

Discrimination is difficult, because in its worst form, it is not overt. It is subtle. We

When you're one of ten, you learn quickly you're not entitled to anything but the necessities, hand-me-downs, and cars with 157,000 miles on them and the possibility of exploding gas tanks.

The rich get richer and the poor go to prison.

The sex trade was a lot like the drug trade; everyone wanted to raze the low-income housing where the drugs were sold but ignored the BMWs and Mercedes driving down the streets with $100 bills hanging out the windows.

Labor unions would have us believe that they transfer income from rich capitalists to poor workers. In fact, they mostly transfer income from the large number of non-union workers to a small number of relatively well-off union workers.

In America we have Rockefellers for breakfast.

The race to make more money to keep up with the rich, he says, is the reason Americans are spending less time with children and less time sleeping. It's also the reason Americans feel less happy, since happiness is partly determined by how well we're doing compared with those around us. The race, he said, will only get more destructive as the rich get richer and more numerous

As morally troubling and politically charged as the issue of inequality has become, it's not likely to cause a populist revolt. Most Americans still have a generally positive view of the wealthy and, rightly or wrongly, believe they too can make it to Richistan someday.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

The oppressors, the tyrants, those who trample on the rights of others, the robbers of the poor, those who put wages below the living point, the ministers who make people insane by preaching the dogma of eternal pain; these are the men who drive the weak, the suffering and the helpless down to death.

The real question is, can we prevent the ignorant, the poor, the vicious, from filling the world with their children?

He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.

Strike had recently helped several wealthy young women rid themselves of City husbands who had become much less attractive to them since the financial crash.

Well, that's the upper classes for you," said Strike. "By all means throttle their kids, but don't touch their horses.

I've always been clever . . . but that don't 'elp a woman. It's better to be pretty. You 'ave a better life when you're good-looking. Men always went for Irene, not me. She talked shit all night long, but they liked 'er better. I wasn't bad-looking . . . I just didn't 'ave what men liked.

Robin wondered how aware men were of the power dynamics that played out between them, while women stood watching.

They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgement and lucky breaks.

They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgment and lucky breaks.

The usual strategy for coping with the discomfort of knowing that others are superior in some way is to try to reduce the inequalities by bringing the more fortunate down or by preventing him from being more fortunate. This is the strategy of envy.

the effects of a decline in any one person's after-tax income are dramatically different from those of an across-the-board decline. If you alone experience an income decline, you're less able to buy what you want. But when everyone's income declines simultaneously, relative purchasing power is unaffected. And it's relative purchasing power that determines who gets things that are in short supply.

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.