Quotes About Inequality

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

If I rob a gas station, I'm going to get 15 years. If I steal $400 million on Wall Street, I start plea-bargaining.

The anger from Occupy Wall Street is coming from this simple fact: America no longer seems to be a place where you can work your way up, from rags to riches, from lower class to middle class to upper class.

During the 2005 Bush tax holiday, corporations didn't bring back the billions they stashed overseas to build new factories, increase wages, or create more jobs. The lion's share of that windfall went to CEO raises and stock buybacks for investors on Wall Street.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn't know that from our literature. I'm trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind.

I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child's joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future.

Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time.

If you want a good education, go to private schools. If you can't afford it, tough luck. You can go to the public school.

Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.

My attitude to peace is rather based on the Burmese definition of peace - it really means removing all the negative factors that destroy peace in this world. So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

Class warfare has never created a job.

We need not wait for further, well-placed home video cameras to see that low-intensity warfare is being waged against low-income minorities. We need only listen to the voices of the poor; they can testify that they are dehumanized, disparaged, and despised by the police.

Cities tend to be representations of societies: diversity and inequality find their extremes in urban settings. Yet, when war is added onto pre-existing inequalities, high levels of poverty, or even disaster, urban fragility increases exponentially, making it harder to absorb the shocks of warfare.

I wasn't aware so many kids were lacking basic things like a hot meal at night and somewhere warm and safe to live.

I listen to audiobooks: the last one was Vivienne Westwood's biography. She's the most amazing woman. The way she's used her platform in fashion to be an activist and promote causes like global warming, climate change, and inequality in the world... It gives high fashion, what seems like it can be 'for a certain group,' a way to help real causes.

On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.

The poor, and especially poor people of color, don't have the luxury of raising 'free-range' children without risking severe consequences. Parents of color don't receive a visit and a warning if their children are found playing alone; they are immediately blamed and far more likely to be arrested or lose custody of their children.