Quotes About Inequality

Their prince had weightier matters on his mind just now than the troubles of a farmer whose neighbour had stolen his pig, a cobbler who had bought poor quality leather from a dealer, or a seamstress whose husband beat her every night when he came home drunk.

Of course no on planned to give them pleasure — the poor were put into the world to work, not to have a nice time or look at pretty pictures. That kind of thing was for the rich.

What the fuck do we need money for? So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you're never going to make a difference. Steve, the problem isn't that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn't enough to go around—

No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --

there aren't any 'jobs' left. Just financial engineering and politics. I'm not qualified for either. For one thing, I can't say 'meritocracy' with a straight face.

the American worker's enemy isn't the Mexican worker, it's the auto manufacturer who screws both of them.

If a paycheck could change your life, do you think they'd let you have one?

Someday, people are going to realize that. Someday, enough white folks, enough rich white folks are going to realize that living in a lawless city where hooligans like you can administer beatings and then get your victims locked up for the crime of complaining about it is no good for them. "But long before then, everyone else is going to wake up to that fact. Brown people. White people. Chinese people and Puerto Ricans and everyone

Children working in the carpet industry often suffer from many health problems. These include breathing difficulties from inhaling the carpet fibres, arthritis in their fingers from tying the tiny knots, and growth deformities from working hunched over their looms for so long every day.

The second-century satirist Juvenal calculated that "musicians and popular athletes earn more in a day than the teacher does in a year (Sat. 7.175-177, 240-243).

His panel was on the digital divide

even across class lines that Black women and their babies are much likelier to die in childbirth because of racism/bad healthcare.

United States has become essentially two economies: a first-world economy driven by technicians and their various entourages, and a third-world economy driven by immigrants and, increasingly, the forlorn folks who were formerly our pride, the salt of the earth, the hearty denizens of the American heartland. Americans in name, they have been priced out of the American economy. But from the perspective of techno-economists like

You, and rule!" she said. "You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation.

But you are such a socialist! you're always on the side of the working classes.' `I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.

And again, there was the wage-squabble. Having lived among the owning classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages. Yet, if you were poor and wretched you had to care. Anyhow, it was becoming the only thing they did care about. The care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes. He refused to care about money.

The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor.

He was, in some paralyzing way, conscious of his own defenselessness, though he had all the defense of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.

Being poor produces a way of responding to life circumstances that, while warm and giving, is continually vigilant to threat and chronically stressed in ways that harm a person's mental and physical health.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.

What rent do you pay here? I inquired. I don't know,—what is it, Sam? All we make, answered Sam. It is a depressing place,—bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil,—now, then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro.

For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the cracker Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.