Quotes About Inequality

None of us are as insulated from poverty as we think.

Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

I feel like money is an interesting thing when you don't come from it.

He was adequate, a typical mediocre white male whose career advanced because he was not entirely horrible. Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.

I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.

When the rich think about the poor, they have poor ideas.

It's easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger.

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends, And we have friends and no butlers. (excerpt from 'The Garrett')

And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.

Nineteenth century industrial society had created a new class of slaves,

Rich, but not Trump-rich.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.

Don Jacinto did not reply; perhaps he understood that there was no measure for love of country except in sacrifice, and why ask the poor for more sacrifices? It was the comfortable, the rich like himself--although Istak did not put it this way--who should express it with their wealth. The poor had only their lives to give. -Istak

It is more difficult for the poor to be virtuous. -The Cripple

Virtue and wealth seldom go together. The greatest criminals are also the wealthiest men." -The Cripple

I would like to see all this as a big joke that is being played upon us, but I have seen what was wrought in the past--the men who were destroyed without their being lifted from the dungheap of poverty, without recourse to justice.

The greatest criminals are also the wealthiest men.

You cannot ask the poor for sacrifices," I said. "We are already poor. What can we give? How do you measure the patriotism of the poor?

there is little reason to think that interest group pressure is invariably benign, where a concentrated rich group (e.g., an industry association) competes against a dispersed and poorly organized group (e.g., consumers).

It's sometimes hard for people who have wealth and privilege to understand how frightening life can be for those who have neither

Oh it don't make no kind of sense. Big ol' ox like Grady won't sit next to a colored child. But he eats eggs- shoot right outta chicken's ass!

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

This should remind us to value the many people whose jobs do not generate huge incomes but are worthwhile, essential, even noble—from scholars and teachers to janitors and street cleaners. The market may not reward them, but we should respect them.