Quotes About Inequality

Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider population.

They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic.

Capitalist states seek to keep workers unconscious, Gramsci wrote, because no worker under a capitalist system will ever receive the full amount for his or her labor. This would destroy capitalism. Any worker who truly understood his or her interests would be dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

I don't think we can be entirely happy seeing such misery around us.

I'm driven by the gaps, the things that are missing, the areas where marginalized people exist - and where the least resources are available for them.

Mississippi is akin to an underdeveloped country.

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires!

Hillary is the Mitt Romney of 2016, where she has very little in common with the average person. She doesn't drive herself anywhere, she doesn't put on her own makeup, she doesn't cook her own meals, and she doesn't research her own materials. She has very little in common with the average woman.

Fame was a mixed blessing for me because I thought I could be as big as I wanted to be, and then I realized that I couldn't because of the racist element in the record business.

People in Shanghai make a lot more money than the farmers in the rice paddies. The rice-paddy farmers are not buying Louis Vuitton bags, but the upwardly mobile ones in Shanghai, who are all working in Wall Street-type firms, are infinitely better-dressed than people in the West. Their women take this fashion thing seriously.

Economic mobility will fix income inequality.

If you're mocking anyone, make sure it's those at the top of the food chain, not the bottom.

As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

I've said this before: a homeless guy in Detroit has more mojo than a millionaire in Jacksonville.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

We see new male artists have their first single reach No. 1 on the charts, but it generally takes a female a lot longer to build momentum.

Arguably, the families most at need of housing assistance are systematically denied it because they're stamped with an eviction record. Moms and kids are bearing the brunt of those consequences.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally, and within the society.

The opportunity I had growing up in Montana isn't the opportunities for a whole lot of people.

I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.

As long as some players are getting fined more for showing an advertisement on their boxer shorts or whatever it is than other players are for being racist then that's morally wrong and it has to change.

We're constantly having to go head-to-head with the Bernie Madoffs of the world who just want more and more money.