Quotes About Inequality

The measure of a country's prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.

Wealth will always find their way out of societies where truth and honesty are not established into the societies where there are principles of honesty and truth.

The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry

The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.

In a world of plenty, no one, not a single person, should go hungry. But almost 1 billion still do not have enough to eat. I want to see an end to hunger everywhere within my lifetime.

For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists, but between oppressors and oppressed, between those who want to keep this unjust society and those who want to struggle for justice.

A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said: "I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat."

How would we feel if you could pay extra to smoke on airplanes? When we decide something is a bad idea in general for society, we don't want the rich to be able to buy their way out of it.

Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens. The operational code is: we have a lot; we can get more; we want it all.

For me, being leftist means fighting against injustice and inequality but, most of all, we want to live well.

It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus.

They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

We understand the concept of equality, that we all want to be equal. But I think this is absolutely not true. I don't think anybody really wants to be equal. Everybody wants to be more equal.

The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine

Caroline, furthermore, was wan, pale, and dreamily beautiful, an exquisite creature who wept bitterly when she was told that families "of wretched poor" lived south of Canal Street, which was why her coachman would not drive her there.

Twenty-five years earlier there had not been more than five men in the United States worth as much as five million dollars, and there were less than twenty who were worth a million. Now, however, the New York Tribune would report that there were several hundred men in the city of New York alone who were worth at least a million, and a number who were worth at least twenty million.

If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and seeatshops

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

She wondered why white folks, who had everything, spent so much time fighting over who got how much, while black folks, who had nothing, just sat around feeling sorry for they selves.

Negroes were constantly being arrested in the city, for crimes they committed and for crimes they did not, for rudeness or talking back or looking at a white woman, for being in the wrong neighborhood or being suspected of being in the vicinity of the wrong neighborhood. Upon conviction, many of these men were, in the words of one historian, "literally sold to the highest bidders." Convicts were much in demand as workers, and the state, not the convict, got the wage.

as is most always the case with any disaster, it is those who can least afford to lose who lose the most.