Quotes About Inequality

Rich people didn't get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.

The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.

What do you have to worry about? That you're lonely? That you have a mortgage? That your wife doesn't love you? F you, F you. I have to worry about having enough to eat!

La pobreza no te hace fuerte ni te da lecciones de perseverancia. No, la pobreza sólo te enseña a ser pobre.

If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.

He was the loser Indian father of a loser Indian son living in a world built for winners.

Hell, sometimes it feels like the whole country is on fire. Like a constant conflagration is burning too close to all poor people. Shouldn't rich-ass America be taking care of everybody?

Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

Poverty was our spirit animal.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor.

I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.

A blaster against a knife isn't fair. (a Partini) No shit…and so goes my incentive to fight fairly. You want fair, play with kids. You wanna come at me, make out a will. (Syn)

I will not work with a slave as an equal nor will I share a servant with him. (Valerius) Trust me, boy, we're not equal. You're so far beneath me that I would sooner sit in shit than let you wipe my ass. (Zarek)

My people never dreamed of a world like this. Of having so much without backbreaking, debilitating work. And yet for all the physical improvements, people are still people. They're killing each other to get more to prove a point only the killer understands. Still brutalizing and torturing each other over things that in another hundred years won't even matter.

It's odd, isn't it? The poor hate the rich for having a life they think is easy and for the fact that they think the rich only got the money by screwing them. The rich think the poor are all rustics lacking manners and grace who are unwilling to work as hard as they do to get the money. Both groups see each other as thieves out to steal everything they've earned.

Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead?

American journalists tend to treat inequality as a fact of life. But it needn't be.

All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.

Life's miseries fall disproportionately on children.

Why does life carry some people on the crest of the wave while others drown beneath the water?