Quotes About Inequality

I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.

What I'm getting at is, you know, if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street and getting people jobs, we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half.

There are people much less fortunate than us, and I don't mean people hungry sleeping in the streets either.

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

There are men and women still on the streets, and that's all they are saying Can you spare a quarter? I come from a crowd of people who were current on the outlook on life, who were social and knew where they were and had some input into how things seemed to be.

A lot of people don't know what it's like to actually be hungry. I do. I've also slept on the streets.

In cities like Athens, poor houses lined narrow and tortuous streets in spite of luxurious public buildings.

People might not protest for overtly political or social causes, but when they can't feed themselves and their family, they will take to the streets.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?

Isolated and unincorporated, North Gulfport lacked a basic infrastructure: flooding and contaminated drinking water were frequent problems. Although finally incorporated in 1994 - not long after the arrival of the first casino - many of North Gulfport's streets still lack curbs, sidewalks, and gutters.

The questions that consume me, that keep me up at night, are the people that are sleeping on the streets.

But like everyone else I've come to the sad realisation food banks are an all-too-common feature on the streets of Britain.

I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.

It is a British legacy that we have such a strict hierarchy that we can't even write a letter to our PM.

Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs - like Medicare and crop insurance - that also benefit the rich.

Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.

Yeah, we've made beautiful strides, but what percentage of black people has made that stride when I go back to my neighborhood and see the same thing? I'm the only one who came out of my neighborhood. All of them dead, on drugs, selling drugs. Am I supposed to be honored and happy just by my success?

Davos is an extravagant bun-fight of the vanities, where the 'haves' gather to strike deals with the 'have-mores.'

Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.

One of the striking features of the form of globalisation that has now been established is that it is based on the premise that goods and even capital should be free to roam but labour must remain imprisoned within the nation state.

What is so striking about Liberia is that in a place where there is so much to be done, I have never seen so many people with nothing to do.

To me, freedom of speech and debate are necessary inputs in solving any of our nation's problems, from homelessness and economic inequality to banking, the environment, and national security. Freedom of speech is what Larry Lessig would call a 'root' issue; working on free speech is striking at a root issue.

When my father started talking about strip mining in the Appalachia back in the '60s, I remember a conversation I had with him where he said, you know, this is the richest state in the country if you look at the resources and the land, but the poorest people after the state of Mississippi: the 49th poorest people in the country.

Inequality is a poison that is destroying livelihoods, stripping families of dignity, and splitting communities.