Quotes About Inequality

Inequity, else how can power be assessed, how can the gifts of privilege be valued? For there to be rich, there must be poor, and more of the latter than the former.

And the fact remained, whatever games the gods played, it was hard-working dirt-poor bastards like him who suffered for it.

And that, my love, is precisely my point. Justice bites. With snippy sharp teeth. If it doesn't, then the common folk will perceive it as unbalanced, forever favouring the wealthy and influential. When robbed, the rich cry out for protection and prosecution. When stealing, they expect the judiciary to look the other way. Well, consider this a royal punch in the face. Let them smart.

Capitalism is founded on the selective application of freedom among the few at the expense of everyone else.

Children are dying.' Lull nodded. 'That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.

Uhm, in our universe human civilization has descended into a pseudo-fascist hate-mongering anti-intellectual humorless inflexible lowest-common-denominator corporate fuck-everyone-over paradigm of systemic inequality and suffering and misery except for the chosen few.

Thus the hexagon argument demonstrates ? > 3.

If you're picturing Farmer Juan and his family gratefully wiping sweat from their brows when you buy that Ecuadorian banana, picture this instead: the CEO of Dole Inc. in his air-conditioned office in Westlake Village, California. He's worth $1.4 billion; Juan gets about $6 a day. Much money is made in the global reshuffling of food, but the main beneficiaries are processors, brokers, shippers, supermakets, and oil companies.

Race is the modality in which class is lived.

There is a responsibility on all companies to look at the quantum of pay and the relationship between the top and the bottom.

Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It's hard, but if you're given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans—we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don't recognize us as persons. That's the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.

If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they'd know how that fine salad got on their table.

In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people . . . and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn't have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food—how could they ever pull out of it?

You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can't have running water inside the houses of workers.

Yet, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" opens up a political question. Why should this man be penniless at any time in his life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so insecure?

It seems the less affluent you are, the more you are able to trust people, the more you are able to give others.

WHEN TRAMPS and hoboes would come to their door for food, the southern white people would drive them away. But if a Negro come, they will feed him. They'll even give them money. They'll ask them: Do you smoke, do you dip snuff? Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'. They was always nice in a nasty way to Negroes. But their own color, they wouldn't do that for 'em.

We noticed a lady coming to. us rather frequently. She'd come in a Cadillac, park three blocks away and walk over. She belonged to a class I used to call the well-dressed destitute. She had the clothes, she had the Cadillac, but she didn't have any money.

I've never understood a society of want. We don't have a society of want—not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods and unwanted people.

Money brings security, that was the idea. But it turned out to be just the opposite. If you have a great big house, that meant you had to be fearful again: somebody might rob you. If you had a great big store, you had to be fearful now that there's gonna be a riot—and everything in your store would be stolen. See, money brings more fear than security.

What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.

The poor are so busy trying to survive from one day to the next, they haven't the time or energy to keep score.

Sue Townsend