Quotes About Inequality

All over the world, children facing the challenges of poverty attend schools that aren't designed to meet their extra needs; across country lines, the lives of marginalized kids look far more similar than they do different.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

When you're left on the floor of a hospital gasping for breath, or you can't get your kid a school place, the simplest things are your idea of radical.

Most of the people I've met who are black in other countries look up to the blacks in this country. Though they may talk differently, they are anxious to partake of this country simply because things in their country are not physically on par with what they are here.

Well, you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're all fucking peasants As far as I can see

I'm convinced that the deck is so stacked that only a certain number can get through. I happened to be one of that certain number. That's all.

Black workers earn over $11,000 less annually than white workers. Twenty percent of black and Hispanic Americans live in poverty, compared with less than 9 percent for whites. The median wealth for white Americans is $171,000, compared with $17,600 for black Americans. Less than half of black households are homeowners, compared with nearly three-quarters of white households.13

I tell you, Huda, with the with the service-free arnona they impose on us and the many fines and penalties we East Jerusalem Arabs pay them, we've become the casino where they always win... or even better, the cash cow that they continue to milk.

I'm chronically unemployed. Never had a job my whole life. None of my family did. I take that back. Once my daddy was hired on a construction crew for two weeks and two days. He said it was way more work than it paid. He maintained it was just one more way to take advantage of the poor.

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she'd taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, "I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel." It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. "So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

When we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.

Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.

This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.

Today, the eight richest individuals on earth, all men, own more than does half the planet,6 or 3.7 billion people, combined. The top 1 per cent have more wealth than the bottom 99 per cent combined. There are 1,542 billionaires today, whose fortunes rose by a fifth in 2017,7 to $6 trillion – equivalent to the GDP of the UK and Germany combined.

How unfair it seemed that boys could dream to grow into the tallest oaks, but girls were destined to be the vine that clings to the oak.

Welcome to Hartford. The poorest city in the wealthiest state in the richest country on earth.

Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Elites presuppose masses.

Though familiar with the term white privilege, she foolishly hadn't believed it applied to her. Privileged was the last word she would use to describe herself. She had grown up poor, with a teen mom, and she'd been a school dropout. Jerome had been raised in a loving family that gave him a firm foundation, an education, a solid career. Yet despite all the advantages, he and his boys struggled with matters she could barely imagine.

There is troubling evidence that dismissal on the grounds of self-defense is far more common for men than women.

Due to the system of mandatory cash bail, people in jails across the US have not yet been convicted of a crime, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Even the innocent might remain in jail for days, weeks, or even years simply because they cannot afford their bail.

Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.

The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.

America had created a marvelous economic machine, but evidently one that worked only for those at the top. "Of the 1% for the 1% by the 1%