Quotes About Inequality

I was born dirt-poor with barely a stitch on my back, and no name or prestige attached to me, and no real clout or connections.

If only the majority of the wealthiest top 10 percent of Americans own stock directly - which does not include pension and retirement accounts - then the divide between rich and poor is likely to expand.

Participation in the economy through stock ownership is a pretty important way of keeping the divide between the haves and have-nots from growing.

A girl born in Drumchapel in Glasgow has just as much right to good health and the opportunities provided by a good education as a Surrey stockbroker's son.

The possessions of the rich are stolen property.

My mother - she's a good old classic Northern European socialist - she's totally wonderful, but she raised me up believing that rich people have stolen their money from poor people.

The work of Nigeria is not complete for as long as there is any one Nigerian who goes to bed on empty stomach.

The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows.

I knew when I left school, my stomach would probably hurt from having nothing to eat, and I would be going back to those same circumstances that were breaking me.

Hunger changes you. As your body begins to claw at you, your stomach churning in anger, every person who shares a photo of the fancy meal they're about to eat is no longer your friend.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

I'm a giant person. I can't go and buy women's shoes in a shoe store. I don't even go in the shoe section because it just breaks my heart because the shoes are so beautiful, but they don't fit me.

It's something that black men still go through to this day, which is women clutching their purses, hitting the lock button on store, or just basic attitudes. And even as a U.S. congressman, as a black man, it is very, very frustrating, and you build up an internal anger about it that you can't act on.

We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.

And we're in the middle of a 'perfect storm.' These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand.

For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we'll have more storms - it's how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

I think I understand the relationships between different people within the company: people who are straightforward employees, people who can impact the bottom line, and people who share in the bottom line. I don't think you can understand inequality in America unless you understand what's driving profitability.

We are not strangers to poverty in New Mexico.

Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.

The more grotesque your boss's pay and the less he has do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work with the aim of being promoted to what he has.

It is probably difficult for the average person to imagine becoming accustomed to a yacht, servants, and limousines, but consider how you would feel if you could never take a hot shower again. Many people in wealthier nations have become used to this pleasure and actually think of it as a necessity. Actually, a hot shower is clearly a luxury, especially when we consider that most of the world's population has never experienced such a pleasure.