Quotes About Inequality

He had the tendency, unfortunate for a new member of the committee, to like if not the rich themselves, at least their activities and surroundings, and to dislike the poor; a woman in rags toting a baby, barefoot children, made him feel sadistic rather than compassionate. His socialism, then, had the impatience and unfriendliness of a fashionable doctor forced to attend a tramp run over in the street.

Hervey was not praising the city but suggesting that things like adultery and bad mothering existed in the white downtown aristocratic neighborhoods, and not just among the poor blacks who inhabited Heyward's novels Mamba's Daughters and Porgy.

Everyone that is not a noble," he lamented, "is a slave.

What is fate but the whine of the low-born?

We live under a system by which the many are exploited by the few, and war is the ultimate sanction of that exploitation.

The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.

Then, as now, white America was largely indifferent to even the most shocking crimes, as long as they were restricted to the black community.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story,—the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper.

The benevolent gentleman is sorry; but, then, the thing happens every day! One sees girls and mothers crying at these sales, always! it can't be helped, etc.; and he walks off, with his acquisition, in another direction.

And in those tears they all shed together, the high and the lowly, melted away all the heart-burnings and anger of the oppressed. O, ye who visit the distressed, do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?

But what needs tell the story, told too oft,—every day told,—of heart-strings rent and broken,—the weak broken and torn for the profit and convenience of the strong! It needs not to be told;—every day is telling it,—telling it, too, in the ear of One who is not deaf, though he be long silent.

Why are we so willing not to accept others who are not precisely like us? Why do racism and anti-Semitism, for example, run so deep in the consciousness of many Americans? Is it because of man's basic inhumanity to man, or is it prompted by a sense of inferiority that makes us want to dominate others, to protect our turf, and to seek a status with no competition?

This is a world where the educated get richer and the uneducated get poorer.

It is unthinkable that a rich and enlightened society should permit its unfortunate members to starve in the midst of plenty; but once the justifications are admitted the difficulties still stand undiminished.

All through history it's the nations that have given most to generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

Poor men have more to fear when the laws go down than the rich, for they are less able to protect themselves without law. You had all better shiver when you see a policeman rioting rather than putting down a riot, for he may well come after you next, or stand aside when someone else does.

Life has a nasty way of being increasingly unfair.

the American cowboy was born of Reconstruction and carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: he was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own. The reality was that about a third of all cowboys were men of color—black or Mexican, and sometimes Indian—and that few rose to prosperity.

poverty always breeds violence in one way or another.

They were unmasked now, I saw them all for what they were, little sons and daughters of the eternal poor, the Lumpenproletariat, made only for slavery, for continued slavery. They wanted 'liberty' for everyone, in the abstract, but they couldn't give full liberty to anyone to act on his own!