Quotes About Inequality

The American system for building wealth has always taken wealth away from black Americans and given it to white American - beginning when enslaved blacks were stripped of their humanity and counted as the property that became the white wealth that still benefits white Americans and corporations today.

A system designed to build white wealth will ultimately not work to build black wealth.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

Every one of us who was attracted to the poor had a sense of guilt, of responsibility, a feeling that in some way we were living on the labor of others. The fact that we were born in a certain environment, were enabled to go to school, were endowed with the ability to compete with others and hold our own, that we had few physical disabilities—all these things marked us as the privileged in a way.

Attributing blacks' poor health to inherent racial difference allowed whites like Jefferson both to ignore how disease is caused by political inequality and to justify an unequal system by pointing to the inherent racial difference that disease supposedly reveals.

Why did some people have so much? And yet, compared with Lily, she herself must seem almost rich. Was it all like this? Did every one look with envy at the one above? Funny. And funny, too, that the thought of someone else being worse off than you were yourself should make you feel more cheerful.

There's nothing the bond ghouls hate more than real wage increases for anyone but themselves.

So the worker works part of the day for their wages, part of the day to pay for equipment, loans, raw materials and part of the day to create the profit. So the worker works part of the day for free, creating the profit not for himself or herself but for the capitalist. And

Most of the Americans believed that any culture other than their own was backward and beneath contempt.

Democrats were seen as the party who really cared. Republicans the party of wealthy assholes.

We've conditioned the public to believe women are only making a fraction of what men make for so long now, they'll believe the lie before they believe the correction. This claim has been around for so long it's created its own fucking reality.

We seek to better ourselves, and to be accepting of other cultures. But the result is often that we're hypersensitive to the slightest hint of injustice in our own country, while ignoring appalling abuses in others. Many of us even hold these other countries up as shining examples, when the opposite is true.

Search for 'Black family' and you will see smiling black families all the way down, without even a mixed-race family in sight. Type in 'White family' on the other hand and three out of the five images in the first line alone are either of a black or mixed-race family. Soon it is black family after black family.

Equality in the eyes of God is a core tenet of the Christian tradition. But it has translated in the era of secular humanism not into equality in the eyes of God but equality in the eyes of man. And here there is a problem, which is that many people realize, fear or intuit that people are not entirely equal. People are not equally beautiful, equally gifted, equally strong or equally sensible. They are certainly not equally wealthy. They are not even equally lovable.

Until one corporation is left standing, and the impoverished revolt.

Did you know that there are places in the world where women can just drop the child in the field, and go on with the harvest? What does that suggest to you?" "Third world? Grinding poverty? Gross infant mortality rates?" Bradford guessed.

Caste is not just a division of labor, it is a division of laborers.

We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic rights, we will have inequality. We must remove this contradiction or else who suffer from this inequality will blow up the structure.

Injustice and peace are strange bedfellows

A knowledge of reading, writing, and the elements of arithmetic, is convenient and important to the free laborer, who is the transactor of his own affairs, and the guardian of his own interests—but of what use would they be to the slave?

An intelligent English traveller has characterized as the most miserable and degraded of all beings, "a masterless slave." And is not the condition of the laboring poor of other countries too often that of masterless slaves?

Much of life, however, is characterized by what the sociologist Robert Merton called the Matthew Effect, named after a sentence from the book of Matthew in the Bible, which laments "For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.