Quotes About Inequality

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

The American people have this to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe.

Your country is a constant reproach. It is rich to their poor, strong to their weak, vigorous to their idle, enterprising to their reactionaries, ingenious to their bewildered, can-do to their sit-and-wait, thrusting to their timid.

This upper class is disgusting and I'm furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor.

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as DeTocqueville describes it, a new form of servitude.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another--no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

from miserable, starving children' to 'picking winners',

Is anything fair?" He smiled. "Death is. He treats us all the same.

City folk, particularly politicians, were intimidated by small arms. They preferred to kill people with more modern weapons, like poverty and despair.

Course, that didn't mean luck didn't exist. You either believed in that, or you believed in what those Vorin priests were always saying—that poor people was chosen to be poor, on account of them being too dumb to ask the Almighty to make them born with heaps of spheres.

It is one of the most bitter ironies I've ever had to accept: there are, unquestionably, musical geniuses of incomparable talent who died as street sweepers because they never had the chance to pick up an instrument.

It is hard to imagine that a system with such high inequality could be politically stable.

If the losers remain disorganized and subject to false consciousness, not much will change. If they do organize themselves and find political champions who could tap into their resentment and get their votes, then it might be possible for the rich countries to put into place policies that would set them on the downward path of the second Kuznets wave.

In China, the main offsetting forces—that is, those that may keep inequality high—are the increased share of income coming from private capital, corruption, and regional income gaps. In the United States, those forces are the heavy concentration of capital in the hands of the rich, the unification of high capital and labor incomes in the same people (the "new capitalism"), and the political power of the rich.

Already, among the top 10 percent of wage-earners, we cannot identify differences in observable characteristics (education, experience) that could explain why salaries between the top 1 percent and the remaining 9 percent differ by a factor of ten or more (Piketty 2014, chap. 9).

So a child's path is already determined by age five, provided his or her parents have enough knowledge, foresight, and indeed money. Very few poor or less educated parents have the resources or knowledge to make these choices so early on.

Those who care exclusively about "identities" aim to place everybody on the same starting line but do not care that some come to the starting line with Ferraris and others with bicycles.

What determines inequality among individuals within a single nation? Are there certain regularities that make inequality behave in a particular way as societies develop?

I'm white and everything is made for me." A black female student said, "I'm straight. I can hold hands with my boyfriend without fearing violence." Another student said, "I'm a Christian. I can wear my cross necklace to school and no one calls me a terrorist." A

Unfortunately, there are times when hope isn't sufficient to combat entrenched systemic barriers. It doesn't matter how much hope we have if the deck is stacked or the rules apply to some but not others—that is actually a recipe for hopelessness and despair. We think we should be able to overcome an obstacle; however, the system is rigged so there is no possible positive outcome.

it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.