Quotes About Inequality

Like I said, being an African-American man, you can tell there's two Americas we're living in. They don't want us to be equal.

I used to watch all my friends play with G.I. Joes. I couldn't afford them.

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.

The world can make you very angry.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

N'est-il pas dans la noble destinée de la femme d'être plus touchée des pompes de la misère que des splendeurs de la fortune ?

Ambos, con el espíritu henchido de ansias de éxito, poseían esa elevada inteligencia que pone al hombre en un plano de igualdad con todas las eminencias, y se veían relegado a lo más bajo de la sociedad. Lo injusto de este destino fue un vínculo poderoso.

What a handsome pair! Strange thoughts assail me as it becomes plain to me that these two, so perfectly matched in birth, wealth, and mental superiority, live entirely apart, and have nothing in common but their name. The show of unity is only for the world.

Balzac's father Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from a poor family in Tarn, in the south of France. The author's mother, Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdashers in Paris. Her family's wealth was a considerable factor in the match. She was eighteen at the time of the wedding and Bernard-François fifty.

Men without means ought to be perfect," added Moreau, not suspecting the profundity of that cruel sentence.

El contraste entre un lujo exagerado y una exagerada miseria es lo que impresiona antes que nada.

You are so unlucky as to walk off with something or other belonging to somebody else, and they exhibit you as a curiosity in the Place du Palais-de-Justice; you steal a million, and you are pointed out in every salon as a model of virtue. And you pay thirty millions for the police and the courts of justice, for the maintenance of law and order! A pretty slate of things it is!

Corruption is powerful in the world: talent is scarce. So corruption is the instrument of swarming mediocrity, and you will feel its point everywhere. You will see wives whose husbands have six thousand francs a year, all told, spend more than ten thousand on a dress. You will see officials with a salary of twelve hundred francs buy estates.

Las angustias de los infortunados no son menos dignas de atención que las crisis que revolucionan la vida de los poderosos y de los privilegiados de la tierra. Y además, ¿acaso no hay tanto dolor en unos como en otros?

I went out, leaving traces of my muddy boots on the carpet which covered the paved staircase. I like to leave mud on a rich man's carpet; it is not petty spite; I like to make them feel a touch of the claws of Necessity.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth is capable of converting it into a fact.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

if a man such as Samuel could evolve from a common, working man into a wealthy landowner, there was hope for anyone, provided he was white, for Negroes didn't count, and Indians were dead men walking.

He unlocked the passenger door and it groaned open. "That door is loud," I said. "And this car is a gas guzzler." "That's the point," he said. "Negro men like big cars. We don't believe in conserving energy. After all we've been through, we deserve to be wasteful.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

You know what I have noticed? And this is really sad. Flying first class is less scary than flying coach. They speak to you and they're so nice to you and they want to help you and they know you want a drink before the plane takes off. And they bring it to you without asking. If you're sitting in coach and hoping for a drink, good luck.

Pale Death beats equally at the poor man's gate and at the palaces of kings.

A pauper in the midst of wealth.

During epidemics, the rich have nearly always outsurvived the poor. In some cases they've even benefited