Quotes About Inequality

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute - a white skin.

There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.

It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.

An experience that shaped me happened early in my TV career when I filmed in Mozambique, Angola and Bangladesh for 'Blue Peter' and Comic Relief. Places with extreme poverty. When you see that first-hand as a young person, you take it with you for life.

The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.

Young women, adolescent girls, are more subject to infection, sometimes at a rate of six times that of boys. That tells you a lot about the vulnerability of women.

The problem with one single minimum wage is that you don't allow for younger people, who are less skilled and maybe more easily pushed out of the job market, or that the minimum wage should vary for different regions.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

I think if a youngster leaves school unable to read you're kind of condemning them to a life of poverty and a life of lack of potential.

Technology tools such as laptops are the kind of help that we need. A program that provides laptops for all youngsters would close a gap that most of us are not aware of, or will not admit to, which is a tremendous gap in the poor communities.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes).

High-quality early-childhood programs and health coverage have expanded, and the number of mentoring relationships for at-risk youth has risen dramatically. That progress is encouraging, but it's not evenly distributed.

Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.

There has been little to no attention from policymakers to the economic inequalities young people face. Instead of job creation policies, our country's youth are faced with tuition hikes.

I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.

Successful businesses create jobs; that is true. But the notion that if we cut taxes enough for the very rich and for already hugely profitable businesses, then all that money will trickle down to everyone else in the form of job creation is simply false.

I came from a family of extremely old money, and so by the time I was born, there was really just a trickle of money left.

It is this obsession with GDP and FDI growth and a facile belief that this growth in the GDP would trickle down to the poor as well, that has led to the neglect of the genuine concerns of the poor in the country.

Wealth is used to entrench inequality, not to trickle down and solve it.

The benefits of globalization do not trickle down automatically. It takes politics to make sure that there is a benefit.

The caste system may be more highly developed in countries like India or England, but every tier of society in almost every culture tries to dominate a group it perceives as beneath it.

Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it.

One moment that changed my mentality was the first time I went to Mali when I was six. Soon after that trip, Barcelona signed me, but when I was there I saw children like me, six years old, who didn't have shoes, while I had the opportunity to fulfil my dream. It shocked me. I was six and I didn't understand.