Quotes About Inequality

When upmarket shops like Waitrose collect contributions for local food banks, they serve as a constant reminder to those of my constituents who are lucky enough not to have to worry about where their next meal will come from that those less fortunate than themselves are increasing in number, and suffering more than ever.

Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.

Mountaintop removal coal operations enrich only a handful of elites while impoverishing everyone else in their proximity.

When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.

Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.

Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.

If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.

You see politicians talking about negative gearing or tax on your second home - most people I knew growing up couldn't afford the rent, let alone buying a house, or a second house.

I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, 'Yay! I'm so happy!' It's easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the 'isms' instead, but we can't all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well... it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.

There are hundreds of millions of people around the globe who could safely repay loans but nonetheless do not have access to a line of credit. Financial institutions in developing economies are broken and inefficient, and hard-working people have not been given the chance to establish a credit history.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

The U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged this fact when it reported that those with a bachelor's degree earn on average $1 million more over their lifetime than those with only a high school diploma.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

The Labour party has done more than any other to address gender inequalities, through legislation and other means, and to increase women's representation in politics, which has led to recent increases in the number of female politicians.

Most criminal defendants do not get adequate representation because there are not enough public defenders to represent them. There is a lot that is wrong.

That existential crisis is something you rarely see portrayed by black characters; the idea that people think about their own existence and that they have hopes and dreams is taken away from people of color in their representation.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that's what it does; that's what it's been doing for hundreds of years.

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

We must work harder to lessen inequalities. Only by doing so can we speak with credibility and moral authority to other countries and the People's Republic of China.

Honduras was the original 'banana republic,' and its poverty remains extreme.

I can't be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America.

The Republicans are looking after the financial interests of the wealthiest individuals in this country.