Quotes About Inequality

Being a South Indian from Paramakudi, I know I wouldn't be considered for awards many times.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.

I try not to get too political. But coming from South Africa, where apartheid was a huge problem, and there was lots of inequality, has shaped me in terms of how I view certain issues.

In 2020, no child should go hungry, and yet, in South Carolina 1-in-5 children do.

Mom came from what has been called the poorest place in America - Lake Providence, Louisiana. She was born on the south side of the Mississippi which was mainly African American and even poorer than the rest.

I wanted to show something that Americans don't usually think about when they think about Russia, which is the extreme stratification of Soviet society.

Everyone gets very excited about the idea of space travel, but... it's not going to be everybody that gets to go.

The goatherds were the poorest people of Spain. Probably, they were the richest.

Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.

It is in the best interest of the rich to preserve poverty.

... the love which Kahu received from Koro Apirana was the sort that dropped off the edge of the table, like breadcrumbs after everybody else has had a big meal.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

The little ragged newsboy on the street stands, with wide-open mouth, and envies the business man as he alights from his automobile at the curb and starts into his office. "How happy I would be," the newsboy says to himself, "if I owned a Lizzie." And, the business man seated at his desk inside, thinks how happy he would be if he could add another million dollars to his already overswollen bank roll.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are wrong, by betting against his representation of the world.

The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.