Quotes About Inequality

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

Spatial racism, the erasure of black faces in a predominantly white city, is in full effect in both Crown Heights and Center City Philadelphia. This racism demands that bodies that don't conform to a mandated 'white' status quo can be redlined out of a space.

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

I was the poorest kid in my school, poorest kid in my town, poorest family. That stayed with me forever.

If I were to appear in a programme like 'Sex and the City,' I'm sure I'd be cast as the downtrodden one staying at home and having seven children while the others jet-setted around the world.

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

We have ministers who are incapable of doing what has been ordered from above because there is no follow up, because there are no consequences. If you are poor man and you steal, your hand is cut off after three offences. But if you are a rich man, nobody will say anything to you.

People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.

If everyone in China is a socialist, from whom do they steal?

Power is every stealing from the many to the few.

It's so easy to steal from the bottom 99 percent, but try stealing from the top one percent, and they put you under the jail.

In Brazil, a poor man goes to jail when he steals. When a rich man steals, he becomes a minister.

The kids who take up athletics actually come from modest to poor backgrounds. They make it on their own steam; some of them don't even have the basic means like shoes and enough food to eat.

Housing means dignity, security and dignity for so many across our country, but because of lack of generational wealth, many hardworking families are kept from living their dream of homeownership due to steep downpayment costs.

Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.

Taking responsible steps to reduce poverty is not merely a moral imperative but an economic one.

It's often been said that politics in Islington, in many ways, begins and ends with housing, and it's not hard to see why. Despite the borough's image of exclusivity - the stereotype that it's all Georgian squares and cappuccino bars - the reality is much more complex.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

What were we saying to the country, to our young people, when we lowered capital gains taxes and raised taxes on those who earned their living by working?," asked Joseph Stiglitz: "That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means."39

In that heyday of American inequality, that golden age of Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, the Populists alone saw things clearly: The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.

This much is clear, though, from the elections of the last ten years: those parts of Johnson County with the lowest per capita income and lowest median housing values consistently generated the strongest support for the conservative faction. The areas with the highest income and highest real-estate values—Mission Hills and Leawood—were just as reliably loyal to the moderate machine.22 The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative. This

Anti-populism is always about the powerful lording it over the weak; the credentialed and the high-born reminding the world that the definitions of goodness and justice and truth are whatever they determine.

But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox—a class divide in which class doesn't matter—is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature