Quotes About Inequality

We know that for children, hunger is especially devastating.

I hate it when people throw away food - I've seen too many hungry people.

People are hungry not because there aren't enough farmers or food, but because they don't have access to it or can't afford it.

If I'm stone-cold crazy because I have a hard time going to sleep at night because we have kids that go to bed hungry, then I'll be stone-cold crazy, and I'm OK with that.

Money is wasted on the rich.

That's the way plants down here work: The Mexicans get the shittiest, most dangerous jobs, and the whites still complain.

now her stomach knotted as she remembered the Free-Lunch kids and her patronizing smiles toward them as they presented their dog-eared cards, and the steamy cafeteria ladies would call it out: Free Lunch! And the boy next to her, buzz-haired and confident, would whisper inanely: There's no such thing as a free lunch. And she'd feel sorry for the kids, but not in a way that made her want to help, just in a way that made her not want to look at them anymore.

The Mexicans get the shittiest, most dangerous jobs, and the whites still complain.

I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.

His nametag said Jose. I tried to see if he was missing any fingers. Mexicans don't get cushy box jobs unless they're owed. That's the way plants down here work: The Mexicans get the shittiest, most dangerous jobs, and the whites still complain.

Pure, raging, unbridled capitalism. Now, if they could just find ways to steal our raw materials, evade taxation, and not pay our workers their wages, our profit margin might begin to approach what those guys would consider minimally acceptable.

In this wealthy, technologically advanced, highly educated nation, more and more of our darkest children are dying on the streets--literally. Still, this uncontested reality polarizes adults along racial lines, not as we attempt to discover meaningful solutions to these brutal slaughters but in our racially balkanized expression of beliefs and determinations regarding the cause of these senseless deaths.

La gente dice: pobres tiene que haber siempre. Y se quedan tan anchos, tan estrechos de miras, tan vacíos de espíritu.

say very mildly, we have only one political party in the U.S., the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

There were few comforts to console them during this endless labor. Masters fed their slaves as little as possible, because food cost money. Children usually didn't have real clothes. Instead, they wore rough, itchy sacks with holes cut out for their heads and arms. Harriet

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.

The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam's apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished.

opio ni siquiera era entonces una droga nociva: el láudano era un sedante nada más. Y empleado por los pudientes, que los pobres no podían costearse. La religión es el válium del pobre, eso es

People look at us and see the poor and the mad, but they're looking at us through the bars of their cages. There's a palace in your head, boy. Learn to live in it always.

blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as "untouchables.

But now that I've seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don't know why. Maybe it's because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don't know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I'm starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse.

Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness…there's almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it's some kind of act of civil disobedience. I'm sick of it, Penn.