Quotes About Inequality

There's something heroic about wealthy crusaders who aim to spend down their fortunes to improve society—that is, assuming you like what they're doing. If you don't, that sense of urgency can be unnerving. How many liberals, for example, would be thrilled if the Koch brothers announced that they intended to give away their vast fortune as quickly as possible to make "America a better place"?

Unlike water, which prefers to lie flat as it accumulates, material wealth in complex societies likes to pile itself up into huge pyramids.

In the meantime, powerful industries and business investors spend considerable sums of money in secretive lobbying; persuading, cajoling and needling politicians to pursue policies that are, in effect, corporate welfare programmes. Corporations and banks receive huge public subsidies and bailouts, while the rest of us are largely left to the cold biting winds of 'market' economics. It's socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the rest of us.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.

I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one's own cabin toilet. I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music.

He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman had been accustomed to trample upon him. She didn't wish to marry him, but she wished to keep him. She wished to give him nothing, but that he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.

but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is--that lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen, and sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

When a rich man is hurt his wail goeth heavens high and none may say he heareth not.

When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end. CLAUDIUS Alas, alas. HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

Care for us! True, indeed! They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us.

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.

A beggar's book outworths a noble's blood.

Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful:

No donde come, sino donde es comido. Cierta asamblea de gusanos políticos está ahora con él. El gusano es el único emperador de la dieta; nosotros cebamos a todos los demás animales para engordarnos, y nos engordamos a nosotros mismos para cebar a los gusanos. El rey gordo y escuálido mendigo no son más que servicios distintos, dos platos, pero de una misma mesa; he aquí el fin de todo.

When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

are not all women treated by all men like something inferior, like chattels you take up and put down at will?

These savage laws," Ross said, controlling his temper with the greatest difficulty. "These savage laws that you interpret without charity send a man to prison for feeding his children when they are hungry, for finding food where he can when it's denied him to earn it. The book from which you take your teaching, Dr. Halse, says that man shall not live by bread alone. These days you're asking men to live without even bread.

Tedn't fair. Tedn't just. Tedn't British.

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. Winston Churchill in a letter to Prime Minister Asquith, advocating the forced sterilisation of disabled people

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.