Quotes About Inequality

As everyone knows, water hates poor people.

The reason no one will rent to them is the color of their skin, and although technically at this point in the story of America this reason for not renting to someone is illegal, the reality is, no one cares. The minor god of immigration has gotten Dorothy this far, but the real estate spirits have failed her. She and Wu rent in the only place they can go, which has the benefit of being a place they can afford. The Chinatown SRO.

Money makes people stupid. They don't have to work as hard as people who don't have money. That's why the smart people who do have money mostly use it for one thing… They use it to make sure the people without it don't get any more.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.

The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person's control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They're stuck here.

Children are dying in this city because they're too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook. I put it in my fucking notebook.

I was shown mold, leaking pipes, exposed asbestos insulation, broken toilets, cracked floors, malfunctioning heating units, feces bubbling up from the sewer pipes in the basements. I had seen better government buildings in the slums of Tijuana. Neven and the boys from 23 told me it was bad but what I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got more than one hundred fifty million dollars from the United States government, while Detroit got zero.

The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine's got the city and the black machine's at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.

An earthmover was there, but instead of placing a casket into the ground, it was taking one out. They're removing the dead. Taking him to the suburbs. White flight. Black flight. Now dead flight.

In Detroit, it's so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is $3.50 and movie is 8 bucks. But there aren't any movie theaters left in Detroit so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a 40, and they're barbecuing and laughing because it's fucking entertainment.

Diluted Knowledge.--But, poor children, they are too often badly used by their best friends in the matter of the knowledge

Why, European visitors tell us, we don't know what poverty is." "Neither do we," answered Zava. "Won't you tell us?

She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.

Democracy represents the dictatorship of the exploiting classes.

Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way as lack of it does.

There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.

The system we have, in which there are a few kings and lots of common people, cannot generate wealth. It

If you camp out at the store for a TV, you are a good consumer. If you camp out for social justice, you're a dirty hippie and will be pepper-sprayed.

But, sir, we are told that this is an odious and unpopular tax. I never knew a tax that was not odious and unpopular with the people who paid it... Sir, if you would levy only taxes which in the opinion of everybody, or even of a majority, are not unequal and unjust, you would have such a tax law as I have never yet seen.

Ten men in the country could buy the world and ten million can't buy enough to eat.

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heart-breaking as unemployment...

The big bee flies high, the little bee makes the honey; the black folks makes the cotton, and the white folks get the money.

The rich would have to eat money if the poor did not provide food.