Quotes About Inequality

All I wish to make clear is that, without any increase in population, the progress of invention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and smaller proportion to labor and capital.

we have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and a more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him with the name of freedom

We talk about over-production. How can there be such a thing as over-production while people want? All these things that are said to be over-produced are desired by many people. Why do they not get them? They do not get them because they have not the means to buy them; not that they do not want them. Why have not they the means to buy them? They earn too little. When the great masses of men have to work for an average of $1.40 a day, it is no wonder that great quantities of goods cannot be sold

There is no difficulty in discovering what makes those people poor. They have no right to anything that nature gives them. All they can make above a living they must pay to the landlord. They not only have to pay for the land that they use, but they have to pay for the seaweed that comes ashore and for the turf they dig from the bogs. They dare not improve, for any improvements they make are made an excuse for putting up the rent.

Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?

No amount of artificial reinforcement can offset the natural inequalities of human individuals.

Rand herself composed a sentence that could have come from the pen of a Southern planter: "The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains.

but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.

A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people?

Luxury cannot be obtained other than by enslaving other people.

I have hundreds of roubles that I don't know what to do with, and she stands there in a tattered coat and looks at me timidly," thought Pierre. "And what does she need money for? As id this money can add one hair's breadth to her happiness, her peace of mind? Can anything in the world make her or me less subject to evil and death? Death, which will end everything and which must come today or tomorrow - in a moment, anyhow, compared with eternity.

We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.

To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception of greatness.

Nekhlúdoff clearly saw that all these people were arrested, locked up, exiled, not really because they transgressed against justice or behaved unlawfully, but only because they were an obstacle hindering the officials and the rich from enjoying the property they had taken away from the people.

How many there are of them; how very many and how well fed they all look! And what clean shirts and hands they all have, and how well all their boots are polished! Who does it for them? How comfortable they all are, as compared not only with the prisoners, but even with the peasants!

Stop robbing others before you give money to beggars. With the same hand that we rob one person, we reward another, giving to the poor the money which we have taken from the even poorer. Better no charity than this kind of charity.

En realidad era lo mismo que suele haber en todas las casas de personas que no son muy ricas, pero que quieren parecerse a los ricos, con lo cual sólo logran parecerse entre sí.

A revolution is always distinguished by impoliteness, probably because the ruling classes did not take the trouble in good season to teach the people fine manners.

On the eve of the war, when tsarist Russia had attained the highest point of its prosperity, the national income per capita was eight to ten times less than in the United States—a fact which is not surprising when you consider that four-fifths of the self-supporting population of Russia was occupied with agriculture, while in the United States, for every one engaged in agriculture, two and one-half were engaged in industry.

We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

Only the little people pay taxes.

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

This same finding also occurs in less economically developed nations, such as Brazil, India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. 14 For example, in Poland the ratings correlated .93 from 1957 to 1975, and .94 from 1975 to 1987. 15 But there are problems with

moving into bigger houses in nicer neighborhoods. The outcome