Quotes About Inequality

There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the words "teeny weeny.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people.

This summer one-third of the nation will be ill-housed ill-nourished and ill-clad. Only they call it a vacation.

On tight money: It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom - the old trickle-down theory.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

How can you trust people who are poor and own no property? ... Inequality of property will exist as long as liberty exists.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor, and kill the prophets.

Man's inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.

The truth is that after several decades of neoliberalism, the rich are becoming increasingly richer while the poor are both more numerous and increasingly poorer.

Black saw the connection between crime and poverty.

Never mind the fact that trickle-down economics never quite seemed to trickle down to white working-class voters either—that tax cuts and trade agreements favored Wall Street and the Republican donor class, that the real welfare fraud is large U.S. corporations' fleeing overseas to hire cheap labor and avoid environmental rules, and then collecting a tax break from their allies in the White House and Congress.

Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.

Just as twenty-first century masters of the universe exploit workers, lobby for tax loopholes, and devise or reap profits from predatory business practices, [Thomas] Jefferson and his peers found it very hard to give up the unearned advantages of systems of exploitation.

The problem of the Middle East is poverty more than politics.

Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.

Under the Iranian code, the worth of a woman's life equals half of a man's, a point that often leads to grotesque legal judgments that effectively punish the victims. In this instance, the judge ruled that the 'blood money' for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions.

Liberty and justice for all" were beautiful words, but the ugly fact was that liberty and justice were only for white males.

When I looked at the white people who were doing this, consciously or not, it made me angry because so many of them were baser, less intelligent, less talented than the people they were lording it over. But the whites were in control. We could do nothing about it. We had no power. That was the way society was. I perceived that this was the way it was meant to be: things were organized to keep those who were on top up there. The country was racist all the way through.

Botched abortions are the largest single cause of death of pregnant women in the United States, particularly among nonwhite women. In 1964, the president of the New York County Medical Society, Dr. Carl Goldmark, estimated that 80 percent of the deaths of gravid women in Manhattan were from this cause.

Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Emphasizing a lifestyle based on consumption is the ultimate violence against poor countries.

Consider how the rich countries of the world are filled with hypocritical people. These are the people who complain about children who are starving in Somalia, and speak of the plight of youth in the inner city, speaking as though they are emotionally tortured by these tragedies. But then they refuse to do a thing about it. When they are approached by charities, they give only an infinitesimal fraction of their wealth.