Quotes About Inequality

But being on the bottom of any power differential makes life a lot harder. If you don't belong to the "in" group, your marginalization can contribute to feelings of not belonging.

The team discovered that immune functions in poorer kids had more active inflammatory genes and, simultaneously, expressed more sluggishness in gene networks that control the inflammation response than well-to-do children. The health histories of the poor kids also showed more asthma attacks and other health problems.

Throughout the South, one out of every three children born into slavery died before reaching his or her first birthday; a white infant's chance of surviving was twice as good.50 Conditions were even harsher in the rice and sugar districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.

In 1860, nearly all whites regarded African Americans as inherently inferior, degraded, and dangerous, and found the idea of living alongside them as anything like equals simply inconceivable.

Poor black neighborhoods, in which poverty and its demographic correlates are highly concentrated, also lack the web of social networks that can supervise children after school, watch the street, and quickly seek help if it's needed. Several statistical studies have found close links between violent crime and economic and racial inequality. Usually examining cities or states, these studies

It's horrible how money and fame can make you acceptable while, if you're not famous or rich, you're not acceptable.

Of the 1,800 people living in Austin's colony in 1825, one in four was enslaved.7

Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it. —Stephen F. Austin, 1832

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. … In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

The poor are poor largely because they live in networks of relationships that do not work for their well-being. Their relationships with others are often oppressive and disempowering as a result of the non-poor "playing god" in the lives of the poor.

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.

Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.

Neste mundo, o pecado que paga a passagem pode viajar tranquilamente e sem passaporte, enquanto que a virtude em um pobre é detida em todas as fronteiras.

They were invited to fine homes and exclusive clubs. It was a great war.

Better to be the poor servant of a poor master.

I've seen her kind so many times in town on Saturdays coming in to buy what they can with what they have left over from their husband's drinking. Old before their time, stooped and bent from overwork. Wasting their youth. Sitting around ... waiting for some old man to change, that probably couldn't change if he wanted to, until they have a house full of kids, and at forty look like old women.

When reporting on epidemic diseases that primarily struck the poor in Upper Silesia in 1848, the famed German pathologist Rudolf Virchow observed: "it is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation, that it forgets the most shameful happenings in the daily shame of events."82 The toleration of horrible situations that affect only the health of others is a phenomenon, sadly, that is still very much with us.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

The courtroom is one instance of the fact that while our society may be liberal and democratic in some large and vague sense, its moving parts, its smaller chambers--its classrooms, its workplaces, its corporate boardrooms, its jails, its military barracks--are flagrantly undemocratic, dominated by one commanding person or a tiny elite of power.