Quotes About Inequality

White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise, and sell it to us. They make the profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.

To be angry, poverty has to rub shoulders with wealth.

The poor you will always have with you,' Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?

Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.

The human race has always found a group to marginalize--every culture, every time, every race.

When you are on the lowest rung of society, you are a comforting reminder to those just a bit above you that life could always be worse, that they are not you.

The poor stole what they could from the rich, and the rich stole what they could from the working poor - one act called crime, the other, industry

There's one rule for the men and another for us,

God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.

As the next car in the line pulled up, he sent a last yearning glance after Kate, wanting to imprint that laughing image on his mind forever. Girls like her were not for guys like him, who parked cars and worked construction to earn college money. His imagination hadn't been good enough to guess the way the night would end. But that was then, and this

All suffered, but not equally, for the greatest damage was borne by the poor, whose despair and anger had fueled the Commune

stupidity was an equal opportunity condition.

Like almost every other colored person, I couldn't tell the difference because we'd been going through a "depression" all our lives.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

el poder es una escalera por la cual, cuando se empieza a ascender, no hay ni final ni descenso, salvo la caída, que a muchos les acontece pues arriba no hay lugar para todos.

A golden spoon is useless when the soup bowl is empty.

But maybe that's what getting older is all about, right, Clark? You start to realize just how much of the world is unfair. And how few people care. It's not about justice, right? It's about power. And the people where I live…we don't have any. Not yet.

As Tolstoy wrote, back in 1894, in The Kingdom of God Is Within You: The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

White folks' belief that Negroes were magically gifted struck her as the most absurd form of superstition. Sorcery was in the Bible, which meant it was real, but to Momma it was self-evident that like every other kind of power it would be concentrated in the hands of the mighty.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

Too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail.

Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin's gulags. For what it's worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak. See if this syllogism works, then. Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles.

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

People aren't pissed just to be pissed. They're mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure.