Quotes About Inequality

A fortune for one man that was more than he needed should not be built on ten thousand ruined men who were left without the means of life.

The differences which come under the first head are those which Nature herself has set between man and man;

In short, a large part of the powers of the human race is taken away from the production of what is necessary, in order to bring what is superfluous and unnecessary within the reach of a few.

The agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

Most small farmers have as much use for money as a Supreme Court judge has for a bag of fertilizer.

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.

they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless.

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power. The battle of the poor and the powerless is one of reclamation, not renunciation.

They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

Are we] far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?

there were only three kinds of people in this city – security guards, people who need security guards, and thieves.

Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Filipino cleaning lady, the Indian jamardini, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other people's shit. She's used and abused at will.

The gist of it was the caste (privileged) hindus wanted the power to close the door on untouchables, but on no account could untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The Masters knew that Choice was Power.

Argentina & Iraq have been decimated by the same process with different weapons; an IMF cheque & cruise missiles.

Vi?ai izveidoj?s sp?c?ga netaisn?bas izj?ta un ietiep?gs, bezr?p?gs raksturs, k?ds rodas, tad, kad K?du Mazu visu m?žu sp?dzina K?ds Lielais. Vi?a neko nedar?ja, lai izvair?tos no str?diem un konfliktiem. Paties?bu sakot, vi?a tos pat mekl?ja, varb?t vi?ai tie pat patika.

Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn't afford to live in cities shouldn't live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries.

The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was- the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck- was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of the caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.

For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.

There cannot be a more degrading system of social organisation than the caste system,' said Ambedkar. 'It is the system that deadens, paralyses and cripples the people from helpful activity.'19