Quotes About Inequality

Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.

If a novel were written about Florida's administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: 'Don't get sick, and God help you if you do.'

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.

I don't think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there's some notion that poor people lie about all day not doing anything.

In Latin America, many people live with outstretched hands. Throughout the hemisphere, paternalistic governments accustom people to receiving just enough to survive instead of participating in society.

There's no agents or managers to represent them. Dancers don't have any voice. They have nothing. Nobody can afford a flat to live in. They have to share to be able to survive. In a place like the Royal Ballet, that shouldn't happen.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

My grandmom worked as a maid for most of her life, and she worked in the tobacco and the cotton fields, whatever she could get.

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.

The fact that a baby can be born today and condemned to a life of hardship, struggle, and discrimination simply because of sex is enraging.

As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.

I used to live in a street in Bristol which was, depending on your tabloid of choice, either Britain's most dangerous street or a moral cesspit. People made judgments about me on where I lived. It affected me - it affected my life chances. That is going on today with people in social housing. That, to me, isn't acceptable.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

The working class who toil everyday to pay their rent and put food on their families' tables are tired of being lectured by the fat cats in Washington and Brussels who preach what we need and when we need it.

I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.

Being raised in a developing country opened my eyes to so much I cannot tolerate. In Colombia, education is sometimes considered a luxury, not a human right. And it's not a priority in the agendas of many leaders.

If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.

Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

Allowing the big dogs to create a toll lane for public education, public interest and government programming, and to make it more costly to sell products online, will be bad for Black women and our communities.

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

That consensus was far from complete. In a region where most, and the poorest, farmers were African American, they were ultimately excluded from the Farmers' Alliance and had to build a separate and terribly unequal version, the Colored Alliance. The Farmers' Alliance forced the Knights of Labor to abandon its rule welcoming members of all races as the price of a merger

Brains and talent were sucked onto Wall Street, while other things that contribute to a country's greatness were starved of air. That's called an "opportunity cost," and it was huge.

over the 1982–84 period, taxes actually increased for all those making less than $30,000 a year….For those making over $200,000 a year, however, the Reagan cuts brought an average reduction of…15 percent." Thus was perpetrated, say two other analysts, "what may well have been the most accelerated upwards redistribution of income in the nation's history.