Quotes About Inequality

We had expected three cots in our room, but found one large lumpy bed, a very worn carpet and a single overhead light. "You mean this is what these people got out of their revolution?" Martha daintily picked her way around the room. "Someone should tell them that they're about due for another." She wrinkled her pretty face in distaste. Ethel

Whitefolks couldn't be people because their feet were too small, their skin too white and see-throughy, and they didn't walk on the balls of their feet the way people did - they walked on their heels like horses.

If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn't it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived? I believe so.

I think that everyone thought that the Depression like everything else, was for the white-folks, so it had nothing to do with them.

Power. What men like best for themselves and least in their women.

We're not all created equal. There are the Carries and Royces of the world, high up in their gated mansions and their fancy schools, and then there's me and my family, who are just struggling to keep our footing. Though our paths may cross momentarily, maybe it's better to stick to our own circle, so we don't get hurt when we crash into each other.

There's no justice for the poor man. Money buys justice, and I have no doubt there's a great deal of money in that man's pockets to buy the finest judge on the bench.

There were all kinds of things that people could have done and should have done that would have prevented it. And they didn't. Because the people in power liked where they were just fine, thanks, and they stayed there because of people with money. And the people with the money didn't want to lose a single cent of that money doing the right things. Power makes you stop thinking of anything but yourself.

I bet the pill is harder to get than drugs--which shows how screwed up this world really is!

Patriarchy has no gender.

When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men ; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

consider New Age logic, which suggests that the poor have chosen to be poor, have chosen their suffering. Such thinking removes from all of us who are privileged the burden of accountability.

Given the changing realities of class in our nation, widening gaps between the rich and poor, and the continued feminization of poverty, we desperately need a mass-based radical feminist movement that can build on the strength of the past, including the positive gains generated by reforms, while offering meaningful interrogation of existing feminist theory that was simply wrongminded while offering us new strategies.

White feminists so focused on the disparity between white male/white female economic status as an indication of the negative impact of sexism that they drew no attention to the fact that poor and lower-class men are as able to oppress and brutalize women as any other group of men in American society.

For many people the thrill of having more is intensified by the presence of those who have less. Waste is not the issue here. To many greedy individuals, power lies in withholding resources.

And to the slave, the master's way of life represents the ideal free lifestyle.

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

Let's face the reality that if OJ Simpson had been poor or even lower-middle-class there would have been no media attention. Justice was never a central issue. Our nation's tabloid passion to know about the lives of the rich made class a starting point.

As many black women and other women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than any other group from reformist feminist gains in the workforce, it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing.

I have found white neighborhoods in all the privileged-class environments I have lived in throughout the United States, including Kentucy, to have as active a presence of racial prejudice as their poor counterparts.

Capitalism is a system that works extremely well for someone who is highly motivated and very energetic, but it is not a great system for someone who is not interested in working hard or for someone who feels no need to contribute to the economic well-being of their community.

Many of those living in poverty in this country, in fact, would be considered quite wealthy by poor people in other countries.

it is time for us as a nation to step back and ask ourselves, who is really being treated unfairly — unionized government workers or taxpayers who have to support unaffordable benefits?

We must make our choice," wrote Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.