Quotes About Inequality

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.

Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...

Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school—and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.

Evil exists," he says, not flinching at the word. "I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people-that is my idea of evil.

Still, I think it grieves the heart of God when human beings created in His image treat other human beings like filthy rags.

Era questo che non riuscivo ad afferrare: l'enorme assoluta sproporzione tra la facilità con cui si può uccidere e la grande fatica che si deve fare a morire. Per noi era un'altra sporca giornata di lavoro; per loro la fine di tutto.

Societies work very hard to prevent people from seeing through the veil of myth, fantasy and propaganda which is used to hide the realities of health and disease. For example, the simple fact that the rich live longer and healthier lives than the poor is so easily ignored; society distracts us to consider instead the individual misfortunes and tragedies occurring to poor people.

One of the origins of tipping in nineteenth-century America lies in the refusal of white business owners to pay newly freed, black workers a wage, and there are still documented differences in tips received by servers today based on their race.

Indeed, the instability of families' incomes has risen faster than the inequality of families' incomes.

Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers.

An increase in the visibility of inequality would compound the effect, as the Norwegians discovered.

a middle-class teacher or a working-class taxi driver in San Francisco, and if every morning you watch as millionaires who look like teenagers queue on Van Ness Avenue for the Google bus, the status gap probably feels even bigger than the income gap.

we care about money not so much because of what it buys as because of where it ranks us among our peers.

Activists demanded that economists pay more attention to inequality, which economic development had often seemed to exacerbate.

As long as there is hunger, poverty and treatable disease in the world there is work for us to do. As long as nations fight, and men hate, and corruption stalks the corridors of power; as long as there is unemployment and homelessness, depression and despair, our task is not yet done, and we hear, if we listen carefully enough, the voice of God asking us, as he asked the first humans, 'Where are you?' Hassidim tell the story of the

What was this place, do you think? A library? I think so. Don't suppose the commoners are allowed to read much anymore, are they? That's usually the way it goes.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

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.

And it's absolutely true that male sexual behaviour and female responses to male demands change a lot when they start communicating - and the levels of the communication that I've seen on the ground in very, very poor areas are so high and I think why don't we have that here?

L'immagine che conservo della mezz'ora passata con loro è una scena da film dell'orrore. Ci siamo noi, puliti e in ordine, incolumi, e attorno a noi la cerchia dei lebbrosi, dei radioattivi, dei naufraghi tornati allo stato selvaggio. Solo il giorno prima erano come noi, noi eravamo come loro, ma a loro è capitato qualcosa che a noi non è capitato, e adesso apparteniamo a due umanità separate.

Sex -- the great inequality, the great miscalculator, the great Irritator.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.