Quotes About Inequality

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.

Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies," Binyamin Appelbaum writes, "is that the average American's life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, urban renewal programs demolished 1,600 black neighborhoods, and 90 percent of the low-income units destroyed for urban renewal were never replaced. Between 1934 and 1962 the FHA and the Veterans Administration financed more than $120 billlion worth of new housing, but only 2 percent of this went to nonwhite families.

Having virtually invented a paid profession and being almost exclusively available to the rich, doctors were suspect to the working class.

Opportunity hoarding is the term for this, and it takes the form of admissions procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking, and all sorts of credentialing.

Courts send black teenagers to jail for possession of marijuana, while white college kids are sentenced to community service for driving while intoxicated, a considerably more deadly offense. And Evangelicals editorialize about the sexual abominations of consenting adults, while very little is said about the plague of date rapes in college towns.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies," Binyamin Appelbaum writes, "is that the average American's life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health." Meanwhile, life remains the ultimate privilege, the living lording over the dead.

Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive

Culture thus is a matter of shared meanings, but it is not only that: it is also one of the ways in which exclusion, inequality, and power structures are maintained and reproduced.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty aid does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich social aid levels up social inequalities. Charity separates the rich from the poor aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich.

God didn't make rich people or poor people, our society did.

Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist.

I get asked why there aren't more female directors all the time. I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it. That's not because I think the question is irrelevant or stupid. It's just that there are so many mitigating factors.

There is, happily, a non-redistributive approach to address income inequality - one that doesn't rely upon government. It's to grow the pie. That is, create more decent jobs that pay more.

Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is.

Most people who rely on food banks are there through no fault of their own.

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.

Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.

We talk of a rainbow nation - in a country that remains dichotomized between black and white. We must acknowledge that the rainbow, in fact, is still a dream.

There is plenty of housing - for the rich. But a series of outrageous policies ensure that it remains inaccessible to the poor.

For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle - it might even help one's career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.

If someone offered me a hundred million dollars to make a movie? I would first remind him that there are 850 million people in the world who don't have enough to eat.

In Canada, we just have rich and poor, but we don't constantly remind poor people about it.