Quotes About Inequality

Ben, but Teresa too, must be feeling oppressed by the rich clever world where people could leap off into air under umbrellas and feel safe, because their lives had always been safe.

Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong.

Jonathan Quest, the younger brother, came home for the holidays from his expensive school, like a visitor from a more prosperous world. For the first time, Martha found herself consciously resenting him. Why, she asked herself, was it that he, with half her brains, should be sent to a 'good school', why was it he should inevitably be given the advantages?

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.

make sense out of a world that could produce trips to the moon and silicon chips and computer robots and satellites, yet never touch the impoverished hearts that could still torture, terrorize and kill without mercy or feeling.

So I am a Socialist," said Ingleby, "but I can't stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn't happen." "If everybody had the same face," said Bredon, "there'd be no pretty women.

Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings – people will stand there for hours on end, with their ear-drums splitting – why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while other people work.

But in the meantime it makes you sick to think of it. That these people who pulled themselves up from centuries of oppression and exploitation cannot go on to decent living, to peace and progress and civilization, without the murder of their children, and the blocking of their way because two men—two men—want more power. It is incredible, it is fantastic, it is absolutely beyond all belief... except that it is true.

Racial profiling by doctors can also lead to overmedication. A 2009 federally funded study found that doctors are four times as likely to prescribe powerful antipsychotic drugs to children covered by Medicaid as they are to children whose parents have private insurance.

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

The greater the percentage of blacks living in a neighborhood, the higher the neighborhood death rate, regardless of neighborhood income level.52 It is the neighborhood that makes people unhealthy, not the susceptibility of black people living there. The rate of death is higher for all residents, including whites, who live in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Consider a 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western finding that whites just released from prison fared better in the New York City job market than blacks with identical résumés but no criminal record.

So let me be clear: race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people's health.

Euginicists considered Southern Blacks to be especially unfit to breed based on a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent Blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind. Selective migration was thought to explain the embarrassing finding that Blacks from Northern cities had scored higher on the army intelligence tests than some groups of Southern whites.

She, like other whites in the birth control movement, saw the role of Black leaders and health professionals as facilitating their organizations' efforts among the Black population. They incorporated Blacks in their advocacy to help raise funds and to give legitimacy to the movement's projects in Black communities. But Black members of advisory councils were not invited to participate in national planning, nor were they allowed to manage the clinics that served Black patients.

A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money.

This was a Third World disease attacking First World people. The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads into the First. This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth.

The rich will always be with us.' There is no answer, except to make sure we wealthy are not allowed to use our money as a tool of oppression and subversion of democracy.

The divide between the wealthy and everyone else is a false dichotomy—and one that obscures the real problem: there are many wicked people in the world, rich and poor. That is the real divide—between those who strive to do good, and those who strive only for themselves. Money magnifies the harm the wealthy can do, of course, allowing them to parade their vulgarity and malfeasance in full view of the rest of us.

There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Oh! money! All the troubles in the world can be put down to money—or the lack of it.

Men have the best of this world. I hope that it will not always be so.