Quotes About Inequality

Borders crumble; they won't hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

Don't count on it. There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people

Really it's just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw.

I'm going to tell you something, there's country poor, and there's city poor. No desperate [man in the city] ever went out and shot venison if they were hungry. they shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.

Léopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians' doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment.

Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.

Now, versus the old days. I said maybe the difference was we could see now what all we were missing. With everybody else in the world being richer than us, doing all kinds of nonsense and getting away with it. It pisses you off. It makes you restless.

But Pascal quickly forgave me, and it's a good thing, since friends of my own age and gender were not available, the girls of Kilanga all being too busy hauling around firewood, water, or babies. It did cross my mind to wonder why Pascal had the freedom to play and roam that his sisters didn't. While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

when I looked at Anatole's wrinkled brown knuckles and pinkish palms, I pictured hands like those digging diamonds out of the Congo dirt and got to thinking, Gee, does Marilyn Monroe even know where they come from?

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save the white-trash orphans. And if these kids grow up to throw punches at washing machines or each other or even let's say smash a drugstore drive-through window. Crawl in and take what's there. Tell me how you're going to be surprised. There's your peanut butter sandwich back. Every dog gets his day.

If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top.

All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master's glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the patrón. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.

800 million people are chronically underfed (6 will die of hunger-related causes while you read this article), it's because they lack money and opportunity, not because food is unavailable in their countries.

Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who'd made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery.

In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.

But given the many shapes and forms the back door could take, she was pretty sure he'd already been through a couple of them, whether he knew it or not. Was it even possible to grow up a poor black man in America and avoid the back door?

begun to comprehend that money did not only buy necessities, but so much else as well. She had come to realize that the possessor of money also possessed power, a most desirable asset to Emma, because she knew now that power made you invulnerable. It made you safe. By the same token, Emma had come to bitterly accept the fact that there was no justice or liberty for the poor.

if, in measuring our love, we feel anger, I think we have a further obligation. It is to develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be done to the land not so that people can survive, but so that a relatively few people can amass wealth.

Hirsch calls goods like these positional goods, because how likely anyone is to get them depends upon his position in society.

Justice is less easily applied to the strong than to the defenseless.

Imbued as he was with the idea that only whites could rule the islands efficiently, he was able to consider this a form of patriotism.

Serfdom's abolition in the Caucasus began three years later than in the rest of the Russian empire, in October 1864.

A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can—depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices—institutionalize the gravest injustices.