Quotes About Inequality

Bombay is the ideal microcosm of India, of that whole sense of inequality where you could have the biggest skyscrapers next to the poorest slums.

As a kid, I felt I had it bad - and people where I came from did - but if I'd been in a similar position in America, it could've been 10 times worse. We have the NHS. We don't have slums like I've seen in the Deep south, or shocking intolerance.

The Government regularizes illegal slums inhabited by outsiders, but the government workers or policemen do not get permanent house in Mumbai.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums.

You can be hostile to greed. You can be hostile to income inequality. You can be for raising raises... but you can't be hostile to businesses because 98 percent of businesses are small business people.

A political and economic system that only works for a small group at the top is a system that needs to change.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

Those at the top would do better with a smaller share of a booming economy that elicits a positive politics than they will do with an ever-larger share of an anemic economy that fuels the politics of anger.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

The poor North has much to do with slavery. It staggers under its load and smarts under its lash.

I think I grew up with a profound sense of watching people who were good people, who were smart people, who were hardworking people - God, nobody on this Earth worked harder than my mom and dad - and they had very little.

It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people.

Both my parents were far smarter than the opportunities they had.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

More people smile at me now I'm richer.

Throughout the world, cancer affects the rich and poor, especially where cigarette smoking is rampant.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

It's all very well for the Kinks and Damon Albarn to sing those songs and sneer at Mr. Nine to Five, but again, they're white men, so they didn't have it very hard.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

We're all born into whatever citizenship, circumstances, or class we happen to be born into. Immigrants and so many people in the working class work so hard every day for nickels and pennies and scraps to just barely get by and then realize that this precious life has been completely drained out of us.

It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.

I certainly didn't grow up ever having to worry about where my next meal was coming from. The fact that so many people, even in our own country, worry about something so basic, it's something I really wanted to help to do something about.