Quotes About Inequality

In England, there is this tradition of the upper classes going to very expensive drama schools and then going on having careers. I knew that wasn't an option for me. My mother would never have been able to afford that.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

The coffers are full of money and equipment for the Ferguson Police and the Missouri National Guard to put down a potential uprising, but no money for actually uplifting the people of Ferguson, St. Louis, Missouri and around the nation.

You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

Occupational licensing laws - in trades like moving companies, realtors, hair dressers, limousine services, beauticians, physical therapy, and on and on - stunt small business start ups, destroy jobs, and raise prices for lower-income consumers.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

One of the members of the group, I can't remember which one, found out we were making $3 - $5,000 a night. We were getting a hundred dollars a week a piece. Everybody got upset about it.

Sometimes, you feel like, 'Am I going to be upset about this as a black person or as a woman first? Or am I gonna be both?' Because some things inherently affect black women; some things affect you as a woman and not a black person; and some things just affect you as a black person.

Your ruling class don't care about what happens to you. What seems like some enormous upset in your community is undetectable from a helicopter or a speeding motorcade. They are pitiless.

What is the upside of inequality? I would say that it's a deep pool of properly trained, highly motivated talent that is endeavoring to create innovation that grows our knowledge-based economy.

I think people are always going to be fascinated about the haves and have nots - about the divide between the servants and the rich families upstairs.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs.

Although they are some of the hardest working folks I know, rural Americans earn, on average, $11,000 less than their urban counterparts each year. And they are more likely to live in poverty.

Urban America has been redlined. Government has not offered tax incentives for investment, as it has in a dozen foreign markets. Banks have redlined it. Industries have moved out, they've redlined it. Clearly, to break up the redlining process, there must be incentives to green-line with hedges against risk.

A lot of rappers say 'I'm talking about stuff that goes on, what I grew up in, that I know about.' And these journalists say, 'Yeah, but you're making 80 million dollars, that stuff's not about you.' Look how long he's been making 80 million. He grew up poor in an urban city and the things he's experienced and knows.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.

There is sometimes a tendency to assume that everyone in this great country has adequate housing. But when you go to certain places, certain neighborhoods, both urban and rural, you find out that's not the case, and I think we have to do much more.

Divides between north and south, towns and cities, between urban and rural areas, cause people to experience a gulf in quality of life and future prospects.

It's never said out aloud, or in so many words, but for many urban, upper caste Indians, 'the backwards' are precisely that - citizens of the hinterland, ungainly and otherworldly - an inconvenient blemish on their shining, gleaming future.

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

People of color face more barriers to health care, as do low-income individuals and those living in underserved rural and urban areas.