Quotes About Inequality

Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people.

The most powerful thing billionaires have isn't their voice. It's earth-shattering, continent-moving, war-starting amounts of money.

The people who are the most powerful and have the most money sometimes don't value other people.

Our mothers and fathers want change. They worked all of their lives, but today live in destitution.

When lawmakers start to make laws that hurt single women, often the women that they're hurting the most are not the economically powerful ones. They're not Sandra Fluke. They're not Lena Dunham, who conservatives hate more than anybody. They're hurting low-earning single mothers.

Since all countries around the world began poor, what requires an explanation is not why there is poverty but how some countries rose out of poverty to become prosperous.

In short, attempts to equalize economic results lead to greater—and more dangerous—inequality in political power.

Under these escalating wartime income tax rates, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of more than $300,000— a huge sum in the money of that era— declined from well over a thousand in 1916 to fewer than three hundred in 1921. The total amount of taxable income earned by people making over $300,000 declined by more than four-fifths during those years.[11

the breakdown of law and order brought on by constantly stirred bitter resentments almost invariably leads to more suffering among the less fortunate.

In Virginia, the printing press was deliberately restricted by the powers that be, to keep reading matter from the masses, while the aristocracy often had impressive libraries in their homes.396

The fervor for establishing public schools in Massachusetts found no counterpart in Virginia, where illiteracy was much higher and education was largely restricted to those wealthy enough to afford to have their own children educated at home by tutors. In Virginia, the printing press was deliberately restricted by the powers that be, to keep reading matter from the masses, while the aristocracy often had impressive libraries in their homes.

By 1709, the Irish owned only 14 percent of the land in their own

El hecho de que el trabajo sea más barato en Dubái que en Japón no es simplemente una casualidad. El trabajo es más productivo en los países más ricos. Ésa es una de las razones por las que estos países son más prósperos en general. La venta de equipamiento usado de países ricos a países pobres puede ser una manera eficiente de manejar la situación para ambos tipos de países.

The prevention of competition is essential to exploitation.

Seeing the poor as one vast homogenous mass, we overlook that saving ten children from a painful death by hunger does make a real difference, all the difference for these children, and that this difference is quite significant even when many other children remain hungry.

The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.

You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

for it has always been law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.

The Strong do what they Can, and the Weak Suffer what they Must.

We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it 'social capital, or maybe 'trust'. Others call it 'the rule of law', or 'institutions'. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.

The question is wether any environmental catastrophe, even severe climate change, could possibly inflict the same terrible human cost as keeping 3 or 4 billion people in poverty. To ask that question is to answer it.

More abundance can lead to more competition. If ordinary people live at subsistence levels, powerful people can't really take much away from them—not if they want to come back and take more the next time there's a harvest. But the more ordinary people are able to produce, the more powerful people can confiscate.

el sistema no mercantil tiene la reconfortante ventaja de ocultar el hecho de que los pobres no reciben la misma calidad de educación que los ricos.

Agricultural abundance creates rulers and ruled, masters and servants, and inequality of wealth unheard of in hunter-gatherer societies. It enables the rise of kings and soldiers, bureaucrats and priests—to organize wisely, or live idly off the work of others.