Quotes About Inequality

We're a superpower with a Third World grid.

Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.

It's easy to sit in relative luxury and peace and pontificate on the subject of the Third World debts.

If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.

'District 9' was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and 'Elysium' is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

People in the U.K. don't imagine what it is to live in extreme poverty here in Colombia or anywhere in the so-called Third World.

I don't think that people in America are really given enough information about the Third World.

I can imagine people in Third World countries looking at, you know, someone like Hillary Clinton raising $35 million for her presidential campaign that goes to really, you know, nonproductive means, and they see that, and they just - it's just really immoral, I believe.

The dominant economic approach of the last thirty years is now on its last legs. Letting the market rip and an indifference to inequality are now seen as important causes of the greatest economic crash since the 1930s.

I think in the last thirty years, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. It is not something that you can see with rose-colored glasses.

Thomas Piketty assembles the facts to prove a central point about trickle-down economics: Doesn't work. Never did. He has cold, hard data showing how the rich keep getting richer and how the playing field is rigged against working families.

The shock caused by the September 11 events has also lead to a thorough reflection on the existing disparity between rich and poor countries, on the misery of populations of the South.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank they don't like to think of themselves as poor.

I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It's so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.

Both the federal government and the states should go ahead and soak the rich to reduce inequality and raise money for health care, child care, infrastructure investment, education, decarbonization, and a thousand other priorities.

And though you should live in a palace of gold, or sleep in a dried up ditch, You could never be as poor as the fairies are, and never as rich.

COMMUNISM When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist. Helder Camara

Sara fled upstairs as if the devil himself had been after her, leaning, gasping for breath against the thick wooden door that had no lock on the inside -- symbolic of her position here and a reminder of another age when women had been OWNED like property, and used according to the dictates of the men who possessed them.

The soonest available appointment was three weeks out. That's almost unbelievable in a first-world country.