Quotes About Inequality

Along with racism and sexism, our society has a form of caste system based on what you do for money. We call that jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings and even at home. Why else would we consider housewives second-class citizens? Or teachers lower status than doctors even though their desk-side manner with struggling students is far better than many doctors' bedside manner with the ill and dying?

how does a state manage to achieve, all at once, the highest basket of gas, sales, and income taxes, yet rate nearly dead last in roads and highways, or school performance tests, and have the nation's greatest number of billionaires, and one-sixth of America's welfare recipients, and the largest percentage of any state population below the poverty line?

The three great problems of this century the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

Smallness in a great man seems smaller by its disproportion with all the rest.

In the conflicts between capital and labour, the army has often intervened against labour - never against capital. In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one. The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor.

To steal from a rich man has always been a greater crime than to kill a poor man.

Life is a merciless bully for children born into circumstances of grinding poverty, to unhappy families broken apart by crime, drugs, alcohol. It brutalises the affections, cramps the intellect, destroys aspiration.

There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.

A lot of people have no access to beauty. When I was growing up, my mother had only a few pretty things to look at.

There is a certain beauty and refinement that is often found in our world and it is expensive. It shouldn't necessarily be so. It is just the way our economic system is.

Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.

The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.

Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.

Even the best things are not equal to their fame.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.

Do more and understand that all wealth came from poor people either as the entrepreneurs or the consumers who buy the product that keeps the entrepreneurs in business.

Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker.

Today, there are three kinds of people: the haves, the have-nots, and the have-not-paid-for-what-they-haves.

Employees pay the highest percentage of taxes. Big business and investors pay the least.

If you owe $50, you're a delinquent account. If you owe $50,000, you're a small businessmen. If you owe $50 million, you're a corporation. If you owe $50 billion, you're the government.

There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

Without putting the brakes on out-of-control campaign contributions from individuals and corporations - it will be business as usual, with 1 percent of Americans pulling the strings.