Quotes About Inequality

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.

Todos los hombres son iguales, pero algunos son más iguales que otros.

The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

It's queer, the power of these rich men.

In Paris, if you had no money and could not find a public bench, you would sit on the pavement. Heaven knows what sitting on the pavement would lead to in London-prison probably.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

You do not escape from money merely by being moneyless

the oligarchs have to make use of the masses without significantly raising the general standard of living

All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma, they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

Parecía, de alguna manera, que la finca se había enriquecido sin hacer más ricos a los propios animales... excepto, claro está, a los cerdos y a los perros.

Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.

I should like to understand what really goes on in the souls of plongeurs and tramps and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.

Los Altos quieren quedarse donde están. Los Medianos tratan de arrebatarles sus puestos a los Altos. La finalidad de los Bajos, cuando la tienen -porque su principal característica es hallarse aplastados por las exigencias de la vida cotidiana-, consiste en abolir todas las distinciones y crear una sociedad en que todos los hombre sean iguales.

If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.

El hombre es el único ser que consume sin producir. No da leche, no pone huevos, es demasiado débil para tirar del arado y no es capaz de correr suficientemente rápido como para atrapar conejos.

because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

algún modo parecía como si la granja se hubiera enriquecido sin enriquecer a los animales mismos; exceptuando, naturalmente, los cerdos y los perros. Tal vez eso se debiera en parte al hecho de haber tantos cerdos

Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

So these two classes, rising professionals and sinking workers, which a couple of generations ago were close in income and not so far apart in mores, no longer believe they belong to the same country. But they can't escape each other, and their coexistence breeds condescension, resentment, and shame.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.

And that, against this: the king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it, even though what they had, had come to them intact, or been gained unfairly (the nature of that unfairness perhaps being just that they had been born stronger, more clever, more energetic than others), and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think that not only had they grown it, but had invented the very idea of fruit, too