Quotes About Inequality

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

if admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.

These classes are sometimes discontented, and sometimes not. Sometimes they do not know that anything is amiss with them until the "friends of humanity" come to them with offers of aid. Sometimes

Who dares say that he is not the friend of the poor man? Who dares say that he is the friend of the employer? I

unless restrained by checks and guarantees. There is an insolence of wealth, as there is an insolence of rank. A plutocracy might be even far worse than an aristocracy. Aristocrats

We have an instance right at hand. The Negroes, once slaves in the United States, used to be assured care, medicine, and support; but they spent their efforts, and other men took the products. They

plutocracy would be a civil organization in which the power resides in wealth, in

Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but

All the complaints and criticisms about the inequality of men apply to inequalities in property, luxury, and creature comforts, not to knowledge, virtue, or even physical beauty and strength. But

A monarchical or aristocratic system is not immoral, if the rights and duties of persons and classes are in equilibrium, although the rights and duties of different persons and classes are unequal. An

The thousands of black bodies incarcerated on death row are one legacy of lynching. The highest rates of execution in the United States can be correlated with those states where lynching was most prevalent. America's practice of lynching morphs rather than dies.

All the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The primary function of financial capitalism is to efficiently funnel money from those with an excess of it to those who need it.

Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.

The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor, but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use.

The fabulous boom of the late 199os produced modest to no income gains for most Americans.

there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

Life is not fair...Anyone who says it is, or even that it ought to be, is a fool or worse.

A person can't help their birth.