Quotes About Inequality

Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.

Zelda is black and fat. Yolanda is Mexican and homely. Antonio is a cross-eyed Dominican. Duane is of mixed race and has no teeth. Lucille is albino. Elisa is mute. To Fleming, they are all the same: unfit for other work and therefore easy to trust.

We, the over-class, have taken those basic human drives and advanced our own selves through their exploitation. We have monetized human consumption, manipulated morals and laws to direct the masses by fear or hatred, and, in doing so, have managed to create a system of wealth and remuneration that has concentrated the vast majority of the world's wealth in the hands of a select few. Over the course of two thousand years,

We, the over-class, have taken those basic human drives and advanced our own selves through their exploitation. We have monetized human consumption, manipulated morals and laws to direct the masses by fear or hatred, and, in doing so, have managed to create a system of wealth and remuneration that has concentrated the vast majority of the world's wealth in the hands of a select few.

Like most of the well-intentioned privileged Elisa has met, he has no grasp of the priorities of the servile, how all they want is to get through a shift without trouble.

That was the use of knives for women: to cut food for the men who killed with their knives… who killed those women's husbands, their sons, and their daughters.

a la pobreza se le pega donde más le duele, tirando al aire lo poco que se tiene en la bolsa.

Envy is felt more strongly between near equals than those widely separated in fortune. It does not make sense to envy the Queen of England.

The greater benefits earned by a few could be justified, I realized, if the inequality improved the situation of the worst-off.

Francamente hablando: hay en este mundo desigualdades que asustan

Poverty means death," Gustavo writes. This death, however, is not only physical but mental and cultural as well. It refers to the destruction of individual persons, peoples, cultures, and traditions.

It is a question of social realism, of becoming aware of an already given situation, to start from it, and to modify it.

People were ferociously poor. Farmers were abused everywhere, taxed mercilessly to keep the artisans and merchants in the cities happier with their lords—and so less dangerous.

Why should people with particular skills – always accepting they are skills – live a vastly better economic life than others who have different skills?

Selective paternalism, for those on low incomes or for other groups needing state assistance, is perhaps even worse than general paternalism, since the minority are denied the opportunity to overturn the rule democratically. The

What shall I give my children? who are poor,Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land.

A legnagyobb szegénységi bizonyítvány mi vagyunk – mondja Adorján. – Szegénységi bizonyítvány err?l az országról. Hogy az értelmesek hiába találkoznak, nem tudnak mihez kezdeni önmagukkal és egymással.

Golborne is up to this point in his career a Stanford and Northwestern alumnus with a stellar corporate résumé, but he's never been someone who's had to think of himself as a man of the people. He's never had to make the concerns of the poor his own, and he's never known what it's like to be the public servant of people who want him to be strong and who are deeply suspicious of him at the same time.

The whole society is a slave hierarchy. Everybody curries favor with the echelon above, and keeps his eye on the echelon below to make sure he isn't being undercut. We have something not too unlike that, ourselves. Any organizational society is, in some ways, like a slave society.

Mira, Agustín: el más miserable, el más ignorante de nuestros pobres negros subsistirá después de quedar el mundo reducido a la nada. Su alma es inmortal como Dios.

A defect is ten times worse in a woman.

If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.

She wondered if this were what hell was about. Not a place of punishment but of disparity. Those who had done nothing to earn their fate lived like this, while three miles away, others rode the Ferris wheel and children raised their hands joyfully to a hot-air balloon that rained down candy on their heads.

In the world of the very rich, obtuseness may not quite rise to the level of a virtue, but it's often the norm.