Quotes About Inequality

Dans l'un et l'autre de ces pays, on arrive par des causes différentes à ce résultat, que c'est la partie la plus généreuse, la plus active, la plus industrieuse de la nation, qui consacre ses secours à fournir de quoi vivre à ceux qui ne font rien ou font un mauvais usage de leur travail.

The weak generally mistrust the justice and the reason of the strong.

the Negro and the Indian. These two unhappy races have nothing in common; neither birth, nor features, nor language, nor habits. Their only resemblance lies in their misfortunes. Both of them occupy an inferior rank in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate, at any rate, with the same authors.

The prestige that attached to old things having disappeared, birth, condition, and profession no longer distinguish men or hardly distinguish them; there remains scarcely anything but money that creates very visible differences between them and that can set off some from their peers. The distinction that arises from wealth is increased by the disappearance and diminution of all the others.

If Catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare them for inequality; but the contrary may be said of Protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent, more than to render them equal.

The wealthy members of the community [in America] entertain a hearty distaste to the democratic institutions of their country. The populace is at once the object of their scorn and of their fears.

Whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its members equal and alike, the personal pride of individuals will always seek to rise above the line, and to form somewhere an inequality to their own advantage.

She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor.

Le monde manifeste autant d'indifférence aux amoureux qu'aux pauvres et aux malchanceux.

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.

When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.

We do not admire their president. We know why the White House is white. We do not find their children irresistible; We do not agree they should inherit the earth.

Ain't no way to read the bible and not think God white, she say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest. You mad cause he don't seem to listen to your prayers. Humph! Do the mayor listen to anything colored say? Ask Sofia, she say. But I don't have to ast Sofia. I know white people never listen to colored, period. If they do, they only listen long enough to be able. to tell you what to do.

Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them.

there because of her brilliance but only tolerated because it was clear she was one, too, on whom true Ladyhood would never be conferred.

They then started to test the other children, and it was discovered that none of us had sufficient vitamin C, D, or A in our diets. We never had fruit, never had raw leafy greens, never had milk. There was plenty of this on the Island, you know, but it was all sold, every scrap of it, to the mainland, and had been since slavery time.

White folks is a miracle of affliction.

Folks crying and fanning and trying to keep a stray eye on the children, but they don't stare at Sofia and her sisters. They act like this the way it always done. I love folks.

The men had decided they would be creator, and they went about dethroning woman systematically. To sell women and children for whom you no longer wished to assume responsibility or to sell those who were mentally infirm or who had in some way offended you, became a new tradition, an accepted way of life. As did the idea, later on, under the Mohametans, that a man could own many women, as he owned many cattle or hunting dogs.

Dear God, Harpo ast his daddy why he beat me. Mr —— say, Cause she my wife. Plus, she stubborn. All women good for – he don't finish. He just tuck his chin over the paper like he do. Remind me of Pa.

Well how you spect to make her mind? Wives is like children. You have to let 'em know who got the upper hand. Nothing can do better than a good sound beating. (Walker 2000: 34)

The three wealthiest people in the world own more than the GDP of forty-eight countries!

They were assumed, like women and cats, to have no souls.

Others who were always within their rights to pay him practically nothing for his labor.