Quotes About Inequality

The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants.

earned enough to keep from going hungry, which was more than a lot of my neighbors could say.

The rich were dull and they drank too much…. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money.

He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.

The only possible conclusion that social sciences can draw is some do, some don't.

In these circumstances people in poor families who can't pay their way are surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and, by extension, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them.

The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.

While gentrification has tamed El Barrio, it cannot rewrite its past...

In America, it's where you end up that matters, not how you get there. As long as you get there, no one asks questions. You don't ask. You never ask. And if someone does ask how you got there? It's usually a harmless person who never got anything, never got out, died paying rent as he waited for God to deliver him.

He was fleeced, robbed; and yet he was the exploiter. The government, unhesitatingly obliging to the majority, pocketed his taxes, and allowed him to be bled.

Ci sono poveri per i quali il ricco non è un'aspirazione. Ci sono poveri, in sostanze e in spirito, renitenti alla leva. Ero ostile a quel modo di istigare uno a sopravanzare all'altro, per temperamento non per convinzione. Il male che mi insegnavi a riconoscere, io lo vedevo causato dalle persone. Mi sorvegliavo per non procurarlo, perché anche un rossore risparmiato a un altro fa parte delle proprie responsabilità.

When the bosses exploit them [the workers] they pay no heed to party distinctions and starve them all the same; when the carabinieri pepper their chests with the kings lead, they do not bother to ask what sort of membership card they carry in their pockets.

She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have.

Though it sometimes looks like a rich man will never help the poor; whereas the poor people will give away everything they has to help somebody who ain't got nothing. That's how it looks to me. Don't seem like it ought to be that way, but I reckon the rich ain't got no time to fool with us poor folks.

It ain't fair. Gifts is divided so damn unevenly. Like God just left his damn sack of talents in a ditch somewhere and said, "Go help yourselves, ladies and gents.Them's that get there first can help themselves to the biggest ones. In every other walk of life, a jack can work to get what he want. but ain't no amount of toil going get you a lick more talent than you born with. Geniuses ain't made, brother, they just is. and I just was not.

This was not the only hazard, though it was the worst of them. White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates.

I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those were there to be saved, and those who did the saving.

There's no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty.

Ignorance, foolishness, and poverty-we owned this by our birth.

For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.

Through disparaging interactions with teachers, I realized that I did not do things at home that had value in the school culture. I had no summer vacations; we worked the hardest and longest in the summer. I did not go visit Grandma; she lived with us. I never visited the library; we lived ten miles from the nearest library, and the only vehicle we had was shared for purposes of making a living.

21-23 Oh! Can you believe it? The chaste city has become a whore! She was once all justice, everyone living as good neighbors, And now they're all at one another's throats. Your coins are all counterfeits. Your wine is watered down. Your leaders are turncoats who keep company with crooks. They sell themselves to the highest bidder and grab anything not nailed down. They never stand up for the homeless, never stick up for the defenseless.

For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks. If dey's one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman cars listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.