Quotes About Inequality

As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.

Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

But in this era of concentrated wealth, severe inequality, and rigged rules we have a master narrative that power is inherently evil. That's why the civic myths of this age are dark political melodramas like House of Cards and grim fantasies like Game of Thrones in which nice guys finish headless and the only winners are those who lie, cheat, and kill. We're not in The West Wing anymore, folks. Mr. Smith died in Washington.

The average American is heard only if wealthy donors happen to be saying the same thing.

Who would have known that much of the wealth in their nation's booming economy was created on the other side of the world by the most brutal mistreatment of other human beings, many of them women and children?

By many measures, the Dominican Republic is a land of extremes.

The income of the world's 500 richest people exceeds the cumulative income of the world's 416 million poorest people. —UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.

No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

The gap in quality between the diet of the poorest and that of the richest is wide and widening. The poorest families in America may not look hungry in the way that Victorian orphans looked hungry, but they eat fewer dark green vegetables, fewer whole grains, and fewer nuts.

Inequality among siblings goes all the way to the gut: we are born with different microbes inside us, outnumbering our cells ten to one. Some of them affect our chances of becoming obese in later life and others affect how well we digest our dinner. What we eat is constantly changing the composition of our microbiota, but, equally, the nature of the microbes inside us determines how well we respond to the food we eat.

Until the twentieth century, the threat of famine was a universal aspect of human existence across the world. Harvests failed; populations starved; for anyone but the wealthy, food wasn't to be relied on. Even in rich countries such as Britain and France, ordinary people lived with the daily spectre of going to sleep hungry and spent as much as half their income on basic staples such as grain and bread.

Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.

As long as society is absolutely divided as milk is, the cream being at the top and the impoverished milk at the bottom, so long will society be unbalanced, and liable to be thrown into convulsions out of which will spring wars. A circulation throughout keeps it in health.

The two poorest men in the world are buckled together at the opposite sides of the circle. The man who has so much money that he does not know what to do with it and the man who has no money at all touch each other, as you will find; and one is about as poor as the other.

As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.

In June, 1864, a Texan summed up with striking aptness the Rebel clothing situation. "In this army," he wrote from near Atlanta, "one hole in the seat of the breeches indicates a captain, two holes a lieutenant, and the seat of the pants all out indicates that the individual is a private.

says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.

I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.

Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst poverty, and that's how he feels right now, poor , like a shabby homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionaires. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry.

He could not comprehend what was happening to him, but it had to do with the casual cruelty of people who'd never missed a meal or had a gun stuck to their heads.

I know that man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor one for the alms of my guilt.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.