Quotes About Inequality

If you get rich in the name of the poor, fine and dandy. The problem is when you earn it. If you earn the money in the private sector by starting a business and hiring a lot of people, that's when you become the enemy.

Where is there beauty when you see deprivation and starvation?

But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I've looked outside and seen people starving to death.

I have found people on both sides of the aisle, white and black, that'll give you the shirt off their back. And I've also found people that won't give you a piece of bread if you're starving to death.

It makes me so angry - there's enough food in the world but people are starving. It's all political.

I really feel kind of guilty spending 80 million dollars. People are starving in the world.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.

When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.

In some states, not even 50 percent of black boys finish high school.

Someone once shared a statistic with me about how long it takes women to make their second films. On average, it's three years for men and eight years for women.

My dad is extremely successful, so I've seen the money and luxury growing up. I'm nowhere close to his stature.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

Too often, customary practices and discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, social status, or class are the root sources of pervasive inequality in many countries.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.

Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.

There's a two-tier justice system. And anyone who denies it is either naive or in denial. This is what the reality of America is. If you have certain privileges, if you're from a certain socioeconomic status, you have a certain skin color, the odds are in your favor.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

There are a lot of children in our country that, because of their neighborhood or socio-economic status, do not have the opportunity to attend a good school that will prepare them for life's challenges.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

Money has no religion. Money does not belong to any class or creed. Neither it belongs to a gender nor an age. Money decides fate. Money also decides status. Money buys you food and money buys a basic necessity like water too.

We don't have to accept an economy that doesn't work just because some people have got rich in the status quo. That is not democracy.

Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.