Quotes About Inequality

Focusing on sufficient protections, human rights norms and politics have selectively emphasized one aspect of social justice, scanting in particular the distributional victory of the rich. It is as if in our highest ethics, material gains for the poor were all that could matter, either morally or strategically, when human rights placed any stress on material injustice at all.

In the era of human rights, many (though by no means all) have become less poor, but the rich have been even more decisive victors. It follows that human rights must be kept in proper perspective, neither idolized nor smashed, to recognize the true scope of our moral crisis today and the melancholy truth of our failure to invent other ideals and movements to confront it. Human rights, focused on securing enough for everyone, are essential—but they are not enough.

The very West European states that went furthest toward welfare were also the larger imperial states that excluded from their generosity the vast bulk of humanity in the empire's territories.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau doubted it, complaining that the rise of commerce expanded hierarchies of wealth that both morally enervated the rich and fed disorder, even if they left the poor better off.

Indeed, it is sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have so little to do with the famous "American Dream" but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Misérables.

We all have very different and unique legacies, we all cannot be eagles, some of us were meant to be ants.

I don't know how the poor farmers deal with such situations in real life. It's really sad.

Little girls are kept away from the things that would make them strong, in the name of protection and propriety.

They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?

Women the world over suffer restrictions.

Dry your tears, Queenie. Only one thing world cares less about than a black man's tears, that a black woman's. You be dead soon anyway. You not half as tough as you think you are.

The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get - children. In the meantime, In between time...

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

By the time this concert ends this evening, 30,000 Africans will have died because of extreme poverty. By this time tomorrow evening, another 30,000. This does not make sense.

Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.

Death is the most convenient time to tax rich people.

Income inequality and wage stagnation finally took their place among the principal moral issues of our time.

The total amount of money that Wall Street handed out in bonuses last year was double the total income of ALL full-time minimum wage workers. That's obscene.

Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

Any time you have poverty, joblessness, sub-par public schools, and a lack of opportunity, you're going to have a high rate of crime.

Women were seldom given quality assignments or adequate air time.