Quotes About Inequality

The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness…Like the pecking order in a chicken yard… Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

When he paraded his possessions hereafter, they would not consider the two together. They'd look with envy at the things and pity the man that owned them.

It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different: it put you in a wonder.

They came in wagons [...] People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Miserable, sullen men, black and white under guard had to keep on searching for bodies and digging graves. A huge ditch was dug across the white cemetery and a big ditch was opened across the black graveyard. Plenty

Dat's de reason de sister in black works harder than anybody else in the world. De white man tells de n****r to work and he takes and tells his wife.

He figures that it makes a big man out of him to be passing and passing laws and rules. He thinks that makes him look more like a king. Long time ago he done passed all the laws that could do anybody good. So now he sits up and studies up laws to do hurt and harm, and we're the only folks in Egypt he got the nerve to put 'em on. He aims to keep us down so he'll always have somebody to wipe his feet on. He brags that him and the Egyptian nation is eating high on the hog now.

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes. This

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

What yo' all reckon is the matter sho' 'nough? Must be something terrible when white folks get slow about putting us to work.

Indians don't know much uh nothin', tuh tell de truth. Else dey'd own dis country still.

Whereupon Jim flopped into a chair and held forth at great length on the necessity of keeping wives in their places; to wit: speechless and expressionless in the presence of their lords and masters and cited several instances where men had met their downfall and utter ruin by ill advisedly permitting their wives to air their ignorance by talking. His audience, composed entirely of males, agreed with him. Wife-beaters are numberous in Poplar Street.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It's something I know all too much about.

You need money to have advocacy in America. People that don't have money don't have advocacy.

The real fans of football come from the working class. Now they cannot afford to come and watch the game.

Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.

If people were able to afford to eat nutritious food, I think they would make better choices.

The humanity that is given to other people isn't given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.

There are as many quality African-American actors and actresses as Caucasians, but it seems that they get a lot more opportunities.