Quotes About Inequality

So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.

On Earth, men are seen as superior because of their physical strength, but it means nothing in space, where there is no gravity.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it's a subject below their social standing.

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.

Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships, the poor man everywhere lies low.

Why aren't more gems from our great authors scattered over the country? Great books aren't within everybody's reach.

Of course,' the inspector remarked, with the naïvety of the corrupt, 'if he had really been rich, he would not be in prison.

My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.

one man may insult fifty—it is the privilege of weakness.

Let the rich man rediscover the poor one; the free man the pisoner; and the resurrected man the corpse.

Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die.

Men are much more forcibly struck by those inequalities which exist within the circle of the same class, than with those which may be remarked between different classes. It is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness.

A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

But a people, having taken its rise in civilization and democracy, which should gradually establish an inequality of conditions, until it arrived at inviolable privileges and exclusive castes, would be a novelty in the world; and nothing intimates that America is likely to furnish so singular an example.

Whether democracy or aristocracy is the better form of government constitutes a very difficult question. But, clearly, democracy inconveniences one person while aristocracy oppresses another. That is a truth which establishes itself and precludes any discussion: you are rich and I am poor.

In America] wealth circulates inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it.

When the question is reduced to the simple expression of the struggle between poverty and wealth, the tendency of each side of the dispute becomes perfectly evident without further controversy.

Every year, therefore, the inequality of taxation separated classes and isolated individuals more deeply than ever before. From the moment when taxation had as its purpose, not to strike those most capable of paying, but those least capable of defending themselves against it, the monstrous consequence of sparing the rich and burdening the poor was inevitable.