Quotes About Inequality

The image of entrepreneurship as the province of the unprivileged and un-entitled - the Horatio Alger, rags to riches myth - flies in the face of reality.

The criminal justice system in the United States is designed to do two things really well: to railroad black and brown bodies into prison, and to keep police officers out of it.

You have a plantation where you have 10 white people and you have about 50 or 60 black people. The automatic thought was, 'Why didn't they raise up? Why didn't they overpower? They had the numbers.' But really these people, their hope was broken. Their sense of love was broken. Their appreciation for who they were was broken.

When you are already eating as cheaply and meagerly as possible, any raise in cost can quickly plunge you and your family into hunger.

You can see what happens when people don't feel they have a chance. You can see the ramifications of that.

The crime bill basically incentivized the prison system. There were quotas, mandatory minimums. You have to serve 85 percent of your time, so it is guaranteeing that bodies will always be locked up. And that went mostly towards minority communities and poor communities, where crime is more rampant.

The Box would not play 'Takin' These' because we had a scene where we were taking furniture out of Rockefeller's mansion and giving the stuff out on the street for free.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

Climate change pries further apart the haves and have-nots.

The only way to gain the kinds of often-generational wealth that the 1% has been able to gain is through controlling the populations it relied on to make its wealth.

When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

I mean, one thing I know about change is we are not going to close the achievement gap without educators.

There is a huge gap between the remuneration of an actor and actress.

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

South Tel Aviv has turned into the garbage can of the country.

When you go to places like Gary and Detroit, you see the economic problem in this country and who it's really affecting.

The richest Indonesians have maybe $5 billion. Bill Gates has $50 billion.

Gender discrimination is not the only form of discrimination one has to deal with.

The black community is broken up in general.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

Because I'm a young black man driving a really nice, expensive car, I sometimes get harassed when I'm rolling through a ghetto neighbourhood.