Quotes About Inequality

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children?

He wasn' doing nothin' against the law, Ma. I been thinkin' a hell of a lot, thinkin' about our people livin' like pigs, an' the good rich lan' layin' fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hunderd thousan' good farmers is starvin'. An' I been wonderin' if all our folks got together an' yelled, like them fellas yelled, only a few of 'em at the Hooper ranch—

La nostra gente è brava gente; la nostra gente è gente buona. Preghiamo il Signore che un giorno la gente buona non sarà più povera. Preghiamo il Signore che un giorno i bambini avranno tutti da mangiare. E le associazioni dei proprietari sapevano che un giorno quegli uomini avrebbero smesso di pregare. E sarebbe stata la fine.

I lived out at Sunlan' Lan' an' Cattle Company's place. Honest to God, they got a cop for ever' ten people. Got one water faucet for 'bout two hundred people.

the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need.

You got to be awful rich to dress as bad as you do," he said.

It wasn't laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn't know anything was spoiled or independent.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.

Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor.

Sad business, being a Negro man, always underpaid, their eyes don't look like our eyes, bloodshot, brown, liquid in them about to quiver out. Read somewhere some anthropologist thinks Negroes instead of being more primitive are the latest thing to evolve, the newest man.

He slouches down and in answer to Springer says, "Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything.

British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas

What struck me first was the UN's estimate that 850 million people in the world lacked basic literacy. I had to read the number three times to convince myself that it was not too large to be true. The world's population was around 6 billion people. That meant one out of every seven human beings lacked the ability to read or write a simple sentence.

Of the 850 million lacking basic literacy, the UN estimated that two-thirds were women. This had a terrible carryover effect, as it's typically the women who are rearing the family's children. If the mother is educated, it is much more likely that education will be passed on to the next generation.

men paid one group of women to provide the services that their respectable counterparts would not.

As a matter of fact, Ona spent more credits on the window shades alone than you will make in your entire lifetime and that's if you live to be 185." "And that's meant to make me feel better?" I said. "No, that is meant to inform you. I am your computer not your nanny.

Jacob Zuma built a 2 million rand swimming pool, but no one in the family knows how to swim

In the US a child born into a poor family will become a poor adult. The american dream is just that - it is not true, because of the level of extreme inequality.

That whole 99% thing, they are all in the 1% of the world. Every one of them pays a cellphone bill that is the yearly income for a family in much of the rest of the world.

Children have become so expensive that only the poor can afford them.

My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.

The rich son waits for his father to die, the poor just drink and cry.