Quotes About Inequality

Unto those who have, it shall, uncannily, be given.Unto those who have not, it shall, uncannily, be taken away.

The next time you feel like complaining, remember that your garbage disposal probably eats better than 30 percent of the people in the world

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

Poverty is not natural; it is man-made

a mere increase of wages will never redeem the evils of the industrial system

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, But is there because he's a victim of the times. I wear the black for those who never read

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?" Margery said finally. "Ain't the hurt. It's that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it don't matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them, period. It's when you realize they can always just shut you up with a fist. Just like that.

And the New York rich . . . well, they do not live like anyone.

The floods had devastated the lower reaches of the town, home to the poorer families who were less likely to make a noise about it. Or at least have that noise listened to. In the more affluent parts of town, life had already pretty much returned to normal.

You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?' Margery said finally. 'Ain't the hurt. It's that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it doesn't matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them, period. It's when you realize they can always just shut you up with a fist. Just like that

When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

To fret about political, social, or economic inequality in a free society is to fret about the problem of freedom itself, for in the presence of freedom there will always be inequality of some kind.

Yes, of course enormous profits were made from both slavery and empire, but neither "created" capitalism... if capitalism is dependent on the sort of mass-scale exploitation implicit in slavery and imperialism, why did capitalism take so long to materialize? The ancient Chinese, Persians, Romans and Aztecs all had empires and slaves, yet none were capitalist.

Death, in many guises, is one of the by-products of neoliberalism: when people have nothing further that can be taken from them, whether resources or labor or power, they are quite simply disposable.

Everyone knew the draft was rigged to protect wealthy white men from service, while the poor and dark-skinned served in disproportionately high numbers, he said

In an essay for the Saturday Review, a magazine that appealed to economically comfortable, upper-middlebrow readers, King wrote: "The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.

Justice is what the strong do the weak.

I looked over and saw the palsied children battling with their food. No amount of exposure to the members of the privileged class was going to bring them membership in the Yacht Club, an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Upper Crust Debutante Ball of San Marino, or a Mercedes in the garage.

The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.

The inequalities are greater now than in '92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the 'equal level' very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately.