Quotes About Inequality

As the Economist points out, "If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.

If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.

Given the disparity in the size of the states, it's entirely possible that the majority of states are doing worse while the majority of Americans are doing better. The key lesson is to pay attention to the unit of analysis.

When one considers the multitude of unsung of every race, ethnicity, gender, perhaps toiling away in obscurity, their work thrown out after their deaths by philistine relatives and vulgarian landlords, one must weep. And one does.

The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.

Then a homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something that I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there?

A homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food. How can they have the nerve to beg for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there? I didn't care if this guy understood English or not. Tell me when you're out of dog, buddy. Then we can talk about splitting a falafel.

The poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne'er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are greater than their badge of suffering, because they are human.

For whom is it well, for whom is it well? For no one for whom it is well.

In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, society is divided into two groups: one of planners and thinkers living in luxury high above the Earth, and another of workers, dwelling and toiling underground to run the machine that sustains the wealthy. The film is about the workers' revolt, but the broader point is clear. Abundance comes at a cost: scarcity elsewhere.

I used to think that I knew something about poverty. You have not seen poverty until you've seen it in Africa.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power

Those who look at others as simple, one-dimensional caricatures fuel the rage of the dispossessed.

it has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.

All cults are personality cults. All cults are really extensions of whoever the cult leader is. So, whatever the prejudices, the worldview and the ideas of the cult leader are they will be chanted back at him by the crowd. Until massive social and economic inequality as well as the betrayal of the country by the elite are confronted and remedied, this yearning for a cult leader will not go away. Desperate people are looking for somebody to save them.

Some 8,000 nonviolent Occupy protesters were arrested across the nation. Not one banker or investor went to jail for causing the 2008 financial meltdown. The disparity of justice mirrored the disparity in incomes and the disparity in power.

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth.

Aristotle warned that in a democracy, there always existed the potential for the poor to seize the property of the rich. Democracy, Aristotle wrote, could not coexist with huge levels of inequality. Everyone had to have a stake in society. There were other responses to Aristotle's understanding, including from Athenian tyrants and later James Madison, who urged government to reduce democracy and cripple the political power of the working class.

Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. And that, in the eyes of the elite, is what we are.

They have yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate them for their values. They hate them because of their duplicity, greed, use of indiscriminate industrial violence, and hypocrisy.

For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us," Ray said. "Then the word 'nigger' became politically incorrect. So they began calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they get.

The kleptocrats—and, now, those they con—have no interest in the flowery words of inclusivity, multiculturalism, and democracy that a bankrupt liberal class used with great effectiveness for three decades to swindle the public on behalf of corporations.

Nearly half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income.