Quotes About Inequality

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones.

If Jean Valjean had me representing him," he likes to say, "then Les Misérables would've only been six pages long. Dismissed—Loaf of Bread Pilfery.

a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

city health workers set up camp in the gymnasium to ensure that America would have an able-bodied supply of future midlevel managers ready to lead the reinforcement brigades of minimum-wage foot soldiers to their capitalistic battle stations

Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they'd hear the roar of an ocean of sweatshop labour.

Don't tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell, two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable water per year, thinks we're too poor to associate with.

if Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you'd either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren't missing anything.

I have to admit, Doctor, I've never liked our fee-for-service system of medicine. The rich get the best care and the rest can't afford it or lose everything they have trying to pay for it.

There is a saying in the Middle East that "poverty is the mother of terrorism." And hopelessness is the mother of a lot of violence in the world. If the choice is between going to a great banquet in heaven with seventy virgins versus living a life of unemployment and poverty, some will be willing to blow themselves up to escape this life.

Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor.

Not all developing countries are the same.

For every $135 of public money spent on an asylum-seeker in Europe, just $1 is spent on a refugee in the developing world.

I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value.

As a politician, if you are really interested in tackling inequality to ensure that as many people as possible have 'just enough', then you need to ensure that the rich stop using, as Stiglitz puts it, 'their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending'.

The more people are convinced by the 'just enough' approach, the more likely they will be to limit their material consumption, and favour redistributing resources away from those with more than enough towards those with little.

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.

There is an enormous difference between seeing people as the victims of innate shortcomings and seeing them as the victims of structural violence. Indeed, it is likely that the struggle for rights is undermined whenever the history of unequal chances, and of oppression, is erased or distorted.

Managing inequality almost never includes higher standards of care for those whose agency has been constrained, whether by poverty or by prison bars.

The Russian economy was strong, though only the wealthy seemed to enjoy the benefits. Throughout 1913 the stock market surged to record levels,