Quotes About Inequality

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, she said, and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.

If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?

Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin.

There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

Two pennies and an insult were well spent if it meant seeing the spectacle of whitefolks making a spectacle of themselves.

Well, you know, doctors need to work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich.

What does 'poor' mean? No television?" Steve raised his eyebrows. "It means no money," said Bride. "Same thing," he answered. "No money, no television." "Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!" "Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

We worked in the sewing shop, making uniforms for a medical company that paid us twelve cents an hour.

Some whites made sacrifices for Negroes. Real sacrifices.' '...But they haven't been able to stop the killing either. They are outraged, but that doesn't stop it. They might even speak out, but that doesn't stop it either. They might even inconvenience themselves, but the killing goes on and on.

You born here? Naw. Down south. Jacksonville, Florida. Bad country, boy. Bad, bad country. You know they ain't even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put 'em in jail. I tell people that talk about them sit ins I was raised in jail, and it don't scare me none.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise.

Nasty white folks is about the nastiest things they is.

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise. In this world of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening before the dispossessed, the very idea of "plenty" as Utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state, but as normal, everyday, humane life.

Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.