Quotes About Inequality

For my own part, I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth.

The way the system now works, credit is extended to those who don't need it and denied to those who are in desperate need of it.

How is it that one is born of good parents, receives a good education and becomes a good man, while another comes from besotted parents and ends on the gallows? How do you explain this inequality without implicating God?

inequality without implicating God?

D esire, ignorance, and inequality this is the trinity of bondage

The length of sentences depends upon the criminal's wealth and type of legal help more than upon the seriousness of his transgression. Court procedures are slow and cumbersome. It is the poor and stupid criminal who gets the heaviest sentences - so the aim of criminals is to become rich and cunning, and thus avoid the harshest penalties.

Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity

The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

We lived among people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech and in the heaviness of their eyes.

Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor we would know much of the economics that really matters.

If he had been able to sell all his assets at full market value at the moment of his death, in January of that year, he would have taken one out of every twenty dollars in circulation, including cash and demand deposits.2

has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top. The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough. But the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to

Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat.

Rather than erupting in fury, he had experienced a moment of weakness, as though he were about to burst into tears. Without hating Yoshimine (whom he considered a reliable friend even now), he had felt his own arms and legs shrinking before a reality that he could do absolutely nothing about. This feeling, he understood in retrospect, arose from the fact that Yoshimine was a landlord while he himself was an insignificant pauper.

The second . . . when a tenant farmer raises his hand against his landlord and master, regardless of the reasons . . . it leads to unpleasant social repercussions.

Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.

When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.

The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we're fracturing under the weight of it.

If you're not rich, you're a lesser being who shouldn't have the gall to expect a living wage from the decent people who are.

A handful of ten-year-olds with underprivileged hair and no eyebrows were slouched on a wall, scoping out the cars and thinking wire hangers.

Many people in Nixon's camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn't designed to fail, but it wasn't designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs.

There are thousands of kids like us, working across the country to make a sweet for rich kids in other places. Thousands. It's a number that matters to me so much that I can't wrap my mind around it.

This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.