Quotes About Inequality

In 1917, John D. Rockefeller could have paid off the whole US public debt on his own. Today, Bill Gates's entire fortune would barely cover two months' interest.

king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England.

We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;

Children, I confess, are not born in this state of equality, though they are born to it.

One in seven Americans lives without health insurance, and that's a truly staggering figure.

I tipped young Hylas with a sesterce and turned away discreetly while he disposed of it somewhere about his person. Slaves, especially small ones, must resort to certain subterfuges in order to prevent larger slaves from acquiring their wealth, and it is often inadvisable to wonder too much about where our money has been.

A beggar who goes fishing may use a worm which has feasted on a king as his bait. And the fisherman may eat the fish caught with that bait. What does this tells us? Well, it tells us that a king may progress through the guts of a pauper.

Wage flexibility may not cure an ailing economy, but simply make the rich richer and the poor poorer; you get an economy driven not by wages, but by assets and if those assets stay in the same hands, there is no dynamism and social mobility.

To me, "manners" meant sleeping linesmen at Wimbledon, and bowing and curtsying to rich people with hereditary titles who didn't pay any taxes. Manners meant tennis clubs that demanded you wear white clothes, and cost too much money to join, and excluded blacks and Jews and God knows who else. Manners meant the hush-hush atmosphere at tennis matches, where excitement of any kind was frowned upon.

Some miners' wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.

This house didn't feel like poverty, just like a house owned by white people who'd stopped caring.

Who would think that a hurricane would be political?" she pointed out, speaking of Katrina, "until it was?" (Thompson 2012).

At the same time, African-American males, many of them slaves, had an estimated life expectancy of twenty-three years, 40 percent lower than for whites.)

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Them as work hardest get no respect for it – women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics – and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day's labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family's bellies is all about.

But wasn't that part of a whore's job? Being the sort of ear that lonely men could turn to? I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.

Being a growed woman, it turned out, was harder work than it looked. But that's a thing, too, ain't it? Them as work hardest get no respect for it—women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics—and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day's labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family's bellies is all about.

Only exploitation under various systems all claiming to be different, but all amounting to the farming of the many to make wealthy the few. Serfdoms and indenturehood and chattel slavery.

Wrack and waste, the Kleptocracy actually did it.

If she were to be Exalt, one of these arrogant cryptic beings, it semed unfair that she did not have wings.

I could tell Madame was included in that "girls," and it put my back up. She had years and miles on Dyer Stone, and brains to boot. But he had a prick, and inherited money, and a prick.

By what right does your world cast mine in shadow? What gives you the right to plenty?

To the sagging wharf few ships could come. The population numbered two giants, an idiot, a dwarf.

The worst stressors—exposure to violence, trauma, abuse, and mental illness—are shaped by a surprising factor: the level of income inequality in a region. For example, countries with the biggest gap between their richest citizens and their poorest have the worst health and the most violence.