Quotes About Inequality

We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?

There's still a massive inequality between the genders. If you look at the trajectory of a male actor's career, there's no hesitation or hiatus. But women after the age of 35 to 40 are rarely placed in the centre of the story.

In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.

Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.

A super rich elite have emerged thanks to the lack of law and order, and thanks to the lack of jurisdiction over the transfers of international wealth.

Just ten of the Jewish billionaires on this Earth have more than enough to transform the occupied territories into heaven. We can put the 'pal' back in Palestinian.

The precariat is today's mass class, which is both dangerous, in rejecting old political party agendas, and transformative, in wanting to become strong enough to be able to abolish itself, to abolish the conditions of insecurity and inequality that define it.

We need radical, transformative solutions to address the inequality that is blighting millions of people's lives.

Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.

I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

Historically, our culture has not made room for the nuances of humanity. People have not been kept safe: women, people of colour, queer people, transgender people.

The accumulation and cross-generational transmission of wealth in the United States has gone way too far. When a young hedge-fund manager can take home a sum reminiscent of the gross national product of a small country, something is askew.

Historic inequality continues to cast a long shadow on more than just law enforcement. It affects everything from housing to employment to transportation.

The real pimps are in the government and the corporations. Sometimes, they're one in the same. They're collecting the money you earned and not giving you your cut.

And even those who would like to believe in egalitarianism must ask themselves why we have to be equal only in poverty.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In

I spent most of my [33 years in the Marine Corps] being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for [crony] capitalism.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

Nobody ever got their ass out of the ghetto by letting someone else step ahead of them in line. And no-one ever got rich and famous by laying back and hoping someone would notice who they are and what they do.

Could I climb the highest place in Athens, I would lift up my voice and proclaim, "Fellow citizens, why do you burn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and talk so little care of your children to whom you must one day relinquish all?

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.

Yes,' she said, 'the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones—there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one. Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not—may expatiate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance—discourse

There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones—there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one.