Quotes About Inequality

Let's restore sanity and fairness to the tax cut conversation. We simply cannot afford to hand over the bank vault to our nation's millionaires and billionaires while the middle class picks up spare change.

I just want to tell you what it's like not to have Planned Parenthood... you have to give your kids Ramen noodles at the end of the month to fill up their little bellies so they won't cry. You have to give them mayonnaise sandwiches. They get very few fruits and vegetables because they're expensive.

To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless.

Donald Trump has tapped into a deep vein of racism, nativism, and misogyny.

I have to say that if our global alliances are going to be alliances with Hezbollah and Hamas and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Vladimir Putin's Russia, there is absolutely no chance of building a world-wide alliance that can deal with poverty and inequality and climate change and financial instability, and we've got to face up to that fact.

Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.

The venture capital world is completely stacked against minority entrepreneurs.

An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.

The Badals have grown richer while Punjab is on the verge of bankruptcy.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

I have to wear Eloquii to red carpet events where my friends are wearing custom Versace.

There are millions of homeless children in the world—which proved again that kids were a low-value commodity, didn't it? I mean, there are very few homeless Bentleys in the world.

Author O. Henry coins the term "Banana Republic" for countries with one main product like bananas, ruled by a small rich military-elite of landowners at the tip and a vast impoverished populace crushed beneath like an iceberg.

Whatever the cause, the United States is privately rich but socially poor. It caters to the pursuit of wealth but pays scant attention to those left behind. And though American culture emphasizes individualism and the pursuit of individual wealth perhaps more than any other society, that focus does not lead to greater happiness. Of

The compromises made with the rich are consistently out of line with public opinion. The public desires to tax the rich more heavily, cut military spending, and develop renewable energy alternatives to oil. The outcome instead is tax cuts for the rich, unchecked military spending, and a continued stagnation in alternatives to oil, gas, and coal. Both

When libertarians deride the idea of social fairness as just one more nuisance, they unleash greed. The kind of unconstrained greed that is now loose in America is leading not to real liberty but to corporate criminality and deceit; not to democracy but to politics dominated by special interests; and not to prosperity but to income stagnation for much of the population and untold riches at the very top.

This is an age of impunity, a time when the rich and powerful get away with their misdeeds, and are even lauded for them in some quarters.

According to the latest wealth data of the Federal Reserve Board in the Flow of Funds, the total net worth of households is around $56.8 trillion.27 The wealth of the top 1 percent is therefore around $20.6 trillion. With roughly 113 million households, the average wealth of the richest 1 percent is roughly $18.2 million per household.

The combination of higher income taxation and wealth taxation would thereby raise at least 2 percentage points of GDP from the very top earners. But even if they had to pay another 2 percent of GDP, there would certainly be no need to shed tears for the rich. Their net-of-tax income would remain around 10 percent of GDP, a share of national income two-thirds higher than the 6 percent of GDP in 1980. There

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.

There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich.

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other...

There were pencil scrawls and ink stains, dried blood, snack crumbs; and the leather binding itself was secured to the lectern by a chain. Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions...The dictionary contained every word in the English language but the chain knew only a few. It knew thief and steal and, maybe, purloined. The chain spoke of poverty and mistrust and inequality and decadence.

You know what? We need a recession in this country, because that would finally weed out all the subnormal, underdeveloped, stupefied, puerile people in this workforce.