Quotes About Inequality

Language is being used to make social inequality invisible.

For the oppressors..to 'be' is to have and to be the class of the "haves".

Although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression.

I must intervene in teaching the peasants that their hunger is socially constructed and work with them to help identify those responsible for this social construction, which is, in my view, a crime against humanity. Therefore, we need to intervene not only pedagogically but also ethically.

The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence.

La pobre novela de la risa nacional se complace en inventar estereotipos de pobres hilachentos y mujeres de cuatro dientes, degradados por el sin sentido de sus parches.

In many ways, racial segregation in America has worsened since King's death. National progress has been stalled, indeed reversed, by local, state, and federal policies—from gentrification and zoning laws to tax codes

The Confederacy lost the war but resoundingly won the peace.

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

In a city where human beings struggle for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates

our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.

Being rich, really rich, meant you could go completely crazy, and the only result would be everyone getting so jealous they couldn't stand it.

The rising tide does not lift all boats. Those at the bottom and at the margin are considered undeserving; they are today's equivalent of scripture's widows, orphans, and immigrants.

the polite and polished superstructure of society must never be seen in relation to the substructure of money-grubbing and exploitation that allows it to exist.

I don't think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can't bear environments that make this truth so obvious.

Race and class divisions, power imbalances, anti-intellectualism, anti-democratic leanings, and widespread poverty—not to mention Ponzi schemes—once we saw them as glitches in a country built on high ideals. The Great Man showed us otherwise. The flaws we had called incidental were underpinnings. They comprised a grand tradition, present always.

The rich aren't like us; they pay less taxes.

For most of the past forty years, the American economy has been successful in producing jobs but distressingly unsuccessful in producing jobs that lead to a livable income.

Let's see how long the rich can eat their money for

Start taking money away from the privileged, and they can turn just as savage as any animal that gets shoved into Philippa's arena.

But all we have now is rule by rich people, the ones who keep ninety percent of the world in relative poverty so their unbalanced market can continue paying for a lifestyle of total excess.

Hurting them financially weakens them, and reduces their power over the workers they exploit.