Quotes About Inequality

According to the detailed US census of 1860, which enumerated slaves and slaveholders in its "Agriculture" supplement, the 347,525 owners of one or more slaves constituted only 4.3 percent of the 8,039,000 "whites" in the fifteen slaveholding states (eleven of which would shortly secede) and 2.86 percent of the population of those states as a whole.

Perhaps one-half of 1 percent of the population of the slaveholding states owned a hundred slaves or more, and a few owned a thousand or more. It has been suggested that the 1860 census numbers might have underreported large slaveowners, but it's unlikely that large slaveholders—again, almost the entire political class of the South—amounted to even 1 percent of the population of their states.

The South's 1860 population of 3,953,742 enslaved people comprised or made viable an estimated four billion dollars' worth of private property... ...Four billion dollars was more than double the $1.92 billion value of farmland in the eleven states that seceded.* Without labor Southern land lost what value it had, but even with labor Southern land in 1860 still was worth much less than land in the free states

We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.

lower-income New York

It is still assumed, wrongly, that slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.

It is important to notice that when Emerson said "American," he meant male white people of a certain socioeconomic standing—his. Without his saying so directly, his definition of American excluded non-Christians and virtually all poor whites. Native American Indians and African Americans did not count. In English Traits, when he tallies up the American population, Emerson explicitly excludes the enslaved and skips over native peoples entirely.4

It's easy for a Negro to 'pass' for white. But I don't think it would be so simple for a white person to 'pass' for colored.

And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it's lowest ones

If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent.

In South Africa, to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.

In the Afrikaner's worldview, apartheid and the church went hand in hand.

Es fácil que la gente se comporte como amiga cuando uno es rico, pero muy pocos harán lo mismo cuando uno es pobre. Si la riqueza es un imán, la pobreza es una especie de repelente.

The major event facing the country in 1958 was the general election – 'general' only in the sense that three million whites could participate, but none of the thirteen million Africans.

but he was big and, superwoman or not, Anna knew when all else was equal, big won. Young won. The point was to make sure all else was as unequal as possible.

A lot of people went through life feeling they'd been ripped off. The money, the good jobs, the beautiful women, the rich husbands, had been snatched away from them, given to the wrong people.

Hay algunos que aman su historia y el color de su piel, y hay otros que odian su historia y el color de su piel...

Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.

the public knew, he thought, his feet in their heavy boots sliding among the syringes, if they knew how some people lived and how they died.

United States, along with Canada and the United Kingdom, has become a "plutonomy" where "economic growth is powered by, and largely consumed by, the wealthy few." Economists

In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards.

sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.