Quotes About Inequality

Natural inequalities would make the democrat's life bitter, if slander did not exist.

Democracy celebrates the cult of humanity on a pyramid of skulls.

Even between fanatical egalitarians, the briefest encounter reestablishes human inequalities.

What concerns the Christ of the Gospels is not the economic situation of the poor man, but the moral condition of the rich man.

Economists are surgeons who operate beautifully on the dead and torment the living.

Anyone whose needs are small seems threatening to the rich, because he's always ready to escape their control.

Despising money is like toppling a king off his throne.

Were we all, the whole upper crust of Russian society, so totally insensitive, so horribly obtuse, as not to feel that the charmed life that we were leading was in itself an injustice and hence could not possibly last?

What we witness at the fea is not just a celebration of the multiplicity of modernities but also, and more importantly, a critical commentary on local structures of inequality that take for granted that both tradition and modernity are the prerogatives of the high ranking and wealthy.

The devil take those who first invented balls!" was his reflection. "Who derives any real pleasure from them? In this province there exist want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls! How absurd, too, were those overdressed women! One of them must have had a thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her neighbour.

Ma l'autore si vergogna molto, a occupare così a lungo i lettori con gente di basso livello, sapendo per esperienza che essi fanno conoscenza malvolentieri con i ceti bassi. È pur così l'uomo russo: ha una gran passione a frequentare quelli che sia pure di un solo grado gli stanno sopra, e un reciproco toccarsi il cappello all'incontro con un conte o un principe è per lui meglio di qualsiasi intimo rapporto amichevole.

The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time.

We have torn down the worst slums. The natural meeting-points for the lumpenproletariat have been eliminated, converted into pleasant, dull, clean blocks for dull, clean, adapted families. In the absence of ghettos for the losers, they gather around the centres of pride. If Harlem and its equivalents did not exist, they would gather outside the Rockefeller Center.

But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire's account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.

Nothing meaning the absence of tangible threats—no gun to her head, no knife to her throat—and yet what is poverty if not a threat? What is being called that word or followed down the street by packs of boys if not a threat?

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

Even in the free North, the initial turnover from black to Irish labor does not imply racial discrimination; many of the newly arrived Irish, hungry and desperate, were willing to work for less than free persons of color, and it was no more than good capitalist sense to hire them.

If you are a white male, you don't deserve to live. You are a cancer, you're a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world!

We certainly get a more complete and well-rounded picture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — at court and in the church — if we bear in mind that music still had much of the character of a craft, and that especially in the court sphere it was marked by a very sharp social inequality between the art producer and the patron.

Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry.

In Japan, the highest-paid executive earns only fifteen times what the average worker does. Here, CEOs earn five hundred times more, but that's supposed to motivate the American worker. To do what, kidnap his boss?

Ole Massa always see that we get plenty to eat. O' course it was no fancy rations. Just corn bread, milk, fat meat, and 'lasses, but the Lord knows that was lots more than other poor niggers got. Some of them had such bad masters. Us poor niggers never allowed to learn anything. All the readin' they ever hear was when they was carried through the big Bible. The massa say that keep the slaves in they places.

Start with the observation that megathreats are structural. Income and wealth inequality, massive private and public debts, financial instability, climate change, global pandemics, artificial intelligence, and geopolitical rivalries have deep roots in worldwide systems and cultures. We cannot attack their causes without risking unintended consequences.