Quotes About Inequality

You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days.

Poverty doesn't bring unhappiness; it brings degradation.

It is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. — Shaw's Preface

It is the people who hate poverty, not those who sympathize with it, who will put an end to it.

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.

A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.

I find it discouraging—and a bit depressing—when I notice the unequal treatment afforded by the media to UFO believers on the one hand, and on the other, to those who believe in an invisible supreme being who inhabits the sky. Especially as the latter belief applies to the whole Jesus-Messiah-Son-of-God fable.

If free trade can really turn all these Third World countries into thriving economies full of entrepreneurs and investors, who's gonna clean the fuckin' toilets around here?

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

It could not be said by the media at the time, but it was true. No taxes from the wealthy were raised to pay for the war. Indeed, they were cut!

There is an accelerating gap—not just widening but accelerating—between the ultra rich and everyone else. Why? What are the systemic causes and the systemic effects? And is there anything wrong with some people getting that rich and progressively richer over time?

men above women, Christians above non-Christians, whites above nonwhites, straights above gays.

The major thus-far-unframed effect is that runaway exponential accumulation of wealth share tends to kill off the provision of public resources that makes a satisfying and healthy private life possible.

The political effect of runaway wealth is, for example, to cut taxes on the wealthy, taking away funding for the public resources that made that wealth possible in the first place.

The runaway accumulation of wealth for the rich and the runaway loss of wealth for others mean for most people a runaway loss of experiences of personal value—the loss of a meaningful life.

Global warming is the greatest moral issue facing our generation. Accelerating wealth accumulation by the wealthy is a close runner-up. Together, they present a clear and present danger, not just to the United States, but to the world.

The wealthy people tend to be the good people, a natural elite. The poor remain poor because they lack the discipline needed to prosper.

The rich are thus not just more powerful than the poor, they also have moral authority over the poor and with it the moral responsibility to tell the poor how to live: build self-discipline, work hard, climb the economic ladder, and so become self-reliant. M

In the United States, in 1976 the top 1 percent had 19.9 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 1 percent had 35.4 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 5 percent had 63 percent of the wealth; and the top 20 percent had 88.9 percent of the wealth. That left the bottom 80 percent with 11.1 percent of the wealth.

As the share of the nation's wealth going to the wealthy rises, the share going to everyone else falls. What else falls? The freedom that wealth can buy, the quality of life that wealth can buy, the power that wealth can buy, and the electoral influence that wealth can buy. Technically, we may still have one person, one vote. But the effect of one person on elections has gone way down.

Women are men without money.

In India, by and large, women are not educated enough to be bread winners and, within the moorings of traditional cultures, do not have the courage and the capacity to leave the matrimonial home. Given the inequality prevalent in family structures, the woman's right to opt out is suicidal.

I don't have a horror story to share like the ones we have heard from so many women in the #MeToo movement... But when you really listen to women, you begin to understand the million little ways in which all women are made less and denied the opportunity to contribute to their communities and their country.

The fact that women are paid 73 cents on the dollar for work equivalent to work being done by men is unacceptable in America.