Quotes About Inequality

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

In Phnom Penh, it seems that the more money you have, the more stairs you have to climb to your home. Ma

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

I smoked while they compared booty. Things they took … nail polish, perfume, toilet paper. Things they were given … one-earrings, twenty hangers, torn bras. (Advice to cleaning women: Take everything that your lady gives you and say Thank you. You can leave it on the bus, in the crack.)

The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people n cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do ... in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.

In 2011, the total world wealth1 was calculated to be $231 trillion, up from $195 trillion in 2010.2 Since we are almost 7 billion, that was about $33,000 per person, or $51,000 per adult, as the report indicates. The figures give a clear sense of the level of inequality. In the same year, we spent $498 billion on advertisements.3

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

The overseer's whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell

When will the people see the real cause of all their woe—the private ownership of the means of life? When will the masses learn that property is theirs and theirs only who has produced it—earned it?

Who, pray, are benefiting by all this waste and confusion? The few, a mere small percentage of the population of the world. All the remainder submit, because they think "it always has been so and it must always be so." The work of those who have a conception of a true society of the future, must devote all their efforts toward disabusing the people's minds of the ancient falsehoods. It can be done. Many other hoary lies have passed away, so will this one, too.

Give them to understand that you will not stand patiently by and see your hard earnings squandered by a luxuriating class of idlers.

We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armories enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of crime; but we know they do not prevent crime; that wickedness and depravity exist in spite of them, nay, increase as the struggle between classes grows fiercer, wealth greater and more powerful and poverty more gaunt and desperate.

The Tories and the Lib Dems talk about social mobility, but, short of winning the lottery, the only way to guarantee young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to do better and to raise aspirations is through education.

perché si de' punir donna o biasmare che con uno o più d'uno abbia commesso quel che l'uom fa con quante n'ha appetito e lodato ne va, non che impunito? Sono fatti in questa legge disuguale Veramente alle donne espressi torti

It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.

If one prevents a man from working for the good of society while at the same time providing for the satisfaction of his own needs, then only one way remains open to him: to make himself richer and others poorer by the violent oppression and spoliation of his fellow men.

Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulates riches.

Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.

If Capitalism improves the economic position all round, it is of secondary importance that it does not raise all to the same level. A social order is not bad simply because it helps one more than the other.

Historically the division of labour originates in two facts of nature: the ?inequality of human abilities and the variety of the external conditions of ?human life on earth. These two facts are really one: the diversity of ?Nature

every now and then, i worry about people in the third world countries. and then i figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.

How incredibly easy it is to hide behind white skin, I think, looking at these probable supremacists. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. You're not suspicious. The few black faces in the room stand out in harsh counterpoint.

As it turns out, public defenders are less Superman and more Sisyphus, and there's no small number of lawyers who wind up crushed under the weight of the infinite caseloads and the crappy hours and the shitty pay.