Quotes About Inequality

You can do a great many things if you're rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you'll take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet.

You can do a great many things if you are rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor

I believe those that are on top the heap are better than those that are under it, that they mean to stay here, and that if they are not a pack of poltroons they will.

When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.

We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.

You wouldn't suspect that there was such a thing as a soul if you went to Detroit. Everything is too new, too slick, too bright, too ruthless. Souls don't grow in factories. Souls are killed in factories—even the niggardly ones. Detroit can do in a week for the white man what the South couldn't do in a hundred years to the Negro.

Detroit can do in a week for the white man what the South couldn't do in a hundred years to the Negro.

Maybe the Negro will always be our friend, no matter what we do to him. I remember a conversation with a colored maid in the home of one of my friends. She said, "I do think we have more love for you than you have for us." "You don't hate us ever?" I asked. "Lord no!" she answered, "we just feel sorry for you. You has all the power and the wealth but you ain't happy.

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor

Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are lower than they were 10 years ago, if you can believe that.

Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago. This is truly sad.

Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

It is entirely undemocratic to continue these burdens on the people for years and years after the requirements of protection have been met and the representatives of these industries have become incrusted with wealth.

All men cannot go to college, but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have, for the talented few, centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living as to have no aims higher than their bellies and no God greater than Gold.

Cleaning companies often pay their employees less than a living wage and offer no sick days or health insurance. My years of working for them still made me grimace every time I saw a little yellow car with 'Merry Maids' written on the side.

That's part of American greatness, is discrimination. Yes, sir. Inequality, I think, breeds freedom and gives a man opportunity.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn't get there.

Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.

Global poverty is a complex web of interlinked problems. There is no one 'silver bullet' that will solve global inequality. Multiple contributing factors must be tackled in parallel. Yes, education alone is unlikely to lead to employment without economic reform to address the demand side in much of the developing world.

People are ready to say, 'Yes, we are ready for single-payer health insurance.' We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have national health insurance. We are the richest in wealth and the poorest in health of all the industrial nations.

Will we make all poverty history? No. But can we solve some of these extreme and egregious forms of poverty? I think yes, and we should.

I don't have the privilege of choice to say, 'I want to work with you,' and the person will say, 'Yes, come on, I will write a film for you.' It doesn't happen for people like me who come from the outside.

For one, when has Jay-Z ever taken a knee to come out and tell us that we're past kneeling? Yes, he's done a lot of great work, a lot of great social justice work. But for you to get paid to go into an NFL press conference and say that we're past kneeling? Again, asinine.