Quotes About Inequality

In all ages of the world, some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue.1 —Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Labor, 1847

The Obamas do not seem abashed to enjoy their newfound largesse. They now own a $2.5 million home in Chicago's Hyde Park and a mansion in Washington, D.C., worth $8 million. The D.C. property, in the exclusive Kalorama neighborhood, has 8,200 square feet, including nine bedrooms, a two-tiered flagstone terrace with a courtyard and parking space for 8–10 cars.

Soon Jews were also removed and excluded from journalism, farming, teaching, and the theater. By 1938, Jews could not practice investment banking or the professions of law and medicine. This combination of segregation and state-sponsored discrimination against Jews mirrors what the Democrats did to African Americans.

A thousand pounds for clothes — when one thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter! Oddly, I have never thought of us as poor people — I mean, I have never been terribly sorry for us, as for the unemployed or beggars; though really we have been rather worse off, being unemployable and with no one to beg from.

Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.

The Chief of Student Welcoming writes that the school was created exclusively for youths of the underprivileged countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Lee wonders how they can think he is privileged. It is part of the general stupidity about life in the U.S.

These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People

We have growing wealth creation and growing social inequality. Powerful

America is one of the few places in the world where a "poor" person can still be obese.6

Being born an aristocrat, Lafayette was interested in his own wishes, seeing others' freedoms in the abstract, and had sympathy but not a deep understanding of the poor

Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?

say something like that? The poor boy

In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true.

A poor Negro has at least the excuse of his birth," Edie said. "The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course, that won't do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior. No, he'd much rather stomp around burning crosses and blaming the Negro for everything than go out and try to get an education or improve himself in any way.

Ain't no point in having a god, man, if he's just a slum lord never does nothin'.

The laws are like spiders' webs: just as spiders' webs catch the weaker creatures but let the stronger ones through, so the humble and poor are restricted by the laws, but the rich and powerful are not bound by them (Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings 7.2 ext. 14).

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.

Most people avoid you because they can't afford you.

If we extrapolate the United States population down to a 100-people village]This village that you inhabit has 14 illiterate members and 27 who have a college education; 5 of the villagers earn a third of the village's entire income, while 6 of them earn less than .3 percent of it; 40 of them think and hope your village is headed towards a biblical end-times Armageddon; and 7 of them own a Britney Spears album.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

There are more doctors in a single North Shore medical building than in one entire West Side ghetto.

became a swellhead, a wise guy, an "uppity" nigger. When a white player did it, he had spirit. When a black player did it, he was "ungrateful," an upstart, a

There was a popular saying once that in the North the white man didn't care how close the black man came if he didn't climb too high, and in the South the white man didn't care how high the black man climbed if he didn't come too close.

Ultimately Rockefeller's confidence games proved wildly successful. At its height, his fortune outstripped those of all the other robber barons-even Carnegie's, by a hair. By 1913, Rockefeller's net worth totaled nearly a billion dollars, or 2 percent of the U.S. gross national product; a comparable share today would give Rockefeller a net worth of $190 billion, or more than triple that of the richest man in the contemporary world, Bill Gates.