Quotes About Inequality

One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives," Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.

If I were a man I'd be in the top 1 percent of all fathers. As a mother, I was a complete and total failure.

Can anyone calculate the dollar amount that has been spent to put duct tape over women's mouths in comparison to the amount these companies have paid women to write or direct? I want to compare the money spent on quieting every unspoken truth against every unsold screenplay, unpublished article, and rejected application.

And from the perspective of those in need, that extra quarter of a million bucks your material person spent on the prestige addition for his house looks like an awful lot of lifesaving food and medicine that could have existed if the jerk with the big house in the suburbs hadn't blown it all to artificially inflate his sociogeographic penis.

It. Wasn't. Right. No, it wasn't. But the world wasn't a fair place, was it? And I had more reason to know that than most people twice my age. The world wasn't nice, and it wasn't fair. People who didn't deserve it suffered and died every single day. So what? So somebody ought to do something about it.

Planet Earth isn't a fair place. It's unfair in a broad variety of different ways, some worse than others, but it isn't fair. Not for anybody. And that's pretty much the fairest thing about it.

Planet Earth isn't a fair place. It's unfair in a broad variety of different ways, some worse than others, but it isn't fair. Not for anybody.

Combien de fois avons-nous entendu dire que cinq millions d'enfants se couchent tous les soirs en ayant faim ? Sans doute moins souvent que toutes les fois où nous avons lu ou vu des articles où l'on faisait l'éloge de la richesse.

the U.S., also has the highest rates of suicide, drug abuse, murder, incarcerations, and other negative social factors. Our economy is based on fighting wars—killing people and ravaging the planet—trading paper (mergers, derivatives, etc.), and selling each other things most of us don't need. Meanwhile our planet is drowning in pollution, people are starving, our resources are dissipating, and our animals and plants are disappearing at shocking rates.

Five to one, baby One in five No one here gets out alive

I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up in advance and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.

Wealthy Christians talk about the poor but have no friends who are poor. So they merely speculate on the reasons for their condition, often placing the blame on the poor themselves.

the television money comes in, the top couple of clubs hog most of it. In England the

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Because of increasingly restrictive standards, many poor working people had been cut off Medicaid. Free clinics provided some medical care, but could not supply needed prescriptions or even such over-the-counter preparations as iron supplements for anemic mothers.

There are more people now, more children, going without health care ... A medical team surveying twenty-five hundred poor children in the District found that eight out of ten had untreated medical or dental problems. The infant mortality rate in the District, already the highest in the nation and higher than that of many Third World nations, actually rose ... and prenatal care was considered an important causative factor. ~Lenore Horowitz, quoted by Jimmy Carter

The excessive punishment of prisoners and the use of the death penalty in the United States, alone in the developed world, have continued to fall most heavily on the poor, mentally ill, and people of color. It was on this subject that I made the best speech of my life.

Privilege is something else. Privilege is a judgment. Privilege is an opinion. Privilege is an accusation.

Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer.

There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.

Teaching didn't pay well enough for any luxuries, and Hannah thought that was a shame. There was something really wrong with the system when a teacher could make more money flipping burgers at a fast-food chain.

If wishes were horses, beggers would ride

There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher.

That's because racism isn't just about hate. We all have biases, even if don't think we do. It's because racism is also about who has power…and who has access to it.