Quotes About Inequality

WEIRD people (people in cultures that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)

collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.

And then, to top off the joke, if that is what it is, there are the people with more income than anyone else who pay less tax than anyone else—that is, those with annual incomes of a million dollars or more who manage to find perfectly legal ways of paying no income tax at all.

In the United States it is comparatively easy to raise tax rates and to introduce tax-avoidance devices, and it is comparatively hard to lower tax rates and to eliminate tax-avoidance devices.

The eighteenth-century French tax, in the words of the same authority, "soon became honeycombed with abuses" and degenerated into "a completely unequal and thoroughly arbitrary imposition upon the less well-to-do classes,

After all, the rich get richer and the poor get children. Which is okay so long as lots of them starve in infancy.

Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.

Welcome to American capitalism. It's a great system, except that no one ever has enough.

Ist doch mal wieder typisch dafür, wie es auf der Welt zugeht: Die Leute, die Bücher lieben, können sie sich nicht leisten, während die Leute, die genügend Geld haben, Betriebswirtschaft studieren, damit sie noch mehr Geld einsacken und dafür sorgen können, dass die Buchleser auch in Zukunft machtlos bleiben. Dem armen Volk bleibt nur die öffentliche Bibliothek.

The poor man yields to the rich, the plebeian to the noble, the servant to the master, the unlearned to the learned, and yet every one inwardly cherishes some idea of his own superiority.

You can go to thousand schools, and it's always the same. Because the standard rule of thumb is: There's the girls over here, and there's the boys over there. Separated. Which direction [do I go]?

It's a full-time job being homeless. It's a full-time job being poor.

Came from nothing- less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition...

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn't. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

He put his hand on the book. To those who have, more will be given, he said. From those who have not will be taken even the little that they have

Los Angeles] the world's biggest third-class city...

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.

A few decades back one could get a pretty good idea of someone's overall political stance by finding out how much he hates rich people; the equivalent today is finding out how much he hates white people.

The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.

It was part of Adam's punishment, In the sweat of thy brows thou shalt eat thy bread: it is multiplied to me, I have earned bread in the sweat of my brows, in the labour of my calling, and I have it; and I sweat again and again, from the brow to the sole of the foot, but I eat no bread, I taste no sustenance: miserable distribution of mankind, where one half lacks meat, and the other stomach!

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.

The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more.

The government can't get away with large-scale famine, but it can get away with chronic hunger. It has become an accepted part of life in India.