Quotes About Inequality

In his book Oligarchy, American political scientist Jeffrey Winters provides a stunning illustration of just how dire US inequality has become: the average wealth of the richest one hundred American households relative to that of the bottom 90 percent approximates the wealth disparity between a Roman senator and a slave at the height of the Roman Empire.

Most Americans are unaware that the average income of the bottom 50 percent of their population has declined over a thirty-year period.

It was about a class system, the fact that the underclass, Oskar and Albin, always slipped off the roofs of the rich folk.

The second industrial revolution has yet to be fully experienced by 17% of the world as nearly 1.3 billion people still lack access to electricity.

Put in simple terms, in a post-pandemic world beset by unemployment, insufferable inequalities and angst about the environment, the ostentatious display of wealth will no longer be acceptable.

While inequality between countries has reduced considerably since the 1970s due to the rapid development of emerging market nations, inequality within countries is rising.

One way in which the Fourth Industrial Revolution could exacerbate inequality is via monopoly power: already, for example, Google controls almost 90% of the global market share of search advertising, Facebook controls 77% of mobile social traffic and Amazon has almost 75% of the e-book market.

increasing inequalities might emerge between tech-savvy individuals, who understand and control these technologies, and less knowledgeable individuals, who are passive users of a technology they do not understand.

Morality is only for the middle class, sweet. The lower class can't afford it, and the upper classes have entirely too much leisure time to fill

The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned...

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.

American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. The attack on immigrants, therefore, is both "[p]olitically…an organic expression of nativist hostility and a very useful, rational system of elite-inspired class control"—"the primary product" of which "is… fear.

How absurd it was that in all seven kingdoms, the weakest and most vulnerable of people - girls, women - went unarmed and were taught nothing of fighting, while the strong were trained to the highest reaches of their skill.

Beauty was just another way to discount her, to not see her.

The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.

It is odd there are many movies with many men. But generally movies have one woman, or maybe the older woman and the younger girl.

of 'base-born old folk or ignorant and simple people, vulgar rustics', or of women

If they have money enough for a war, why don't they repair the bridge across the Agri which has been down for four years without anyone moving a finger to fix it? They might make a dam or provide us with more fountains, or plant young trees instead of cutting down the few that are left. We've plenty of land right here, but nothing to go with it.

Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the future, thus justifying gross inequality and humiliation today.

Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person's life that it did not touch.

According to Human Rights Watch, "the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state.

The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine—tactics that went on for at least four decades—left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy.

White rage doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively. In my Washington Post op-ed, therefore, I set out to make white rage visible, to blow graphite onto that hidden fingerprint and trace its historic movements over the past 150 years.

The truth is that when World War I provided the opportunity in the North for blacks to get jobs with unheard-of pay scales and, better yet, the chance for their children to finally have good schools, African Americans fled the oppressive conditions in the South.