Quotes About Inequality

For the elite, living comfortably in their gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place.

Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, after careful reconstruction of the data, have concluded that neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power.

It is no longer the case, if it ever was, that capitalism can be construed as a peaceful, lawful, and non-coercive system.

The effort to transform natural inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity could only lead to the totalitarian state.

Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of the public necessities.

For all their obvious differences, the pope and Mussolini were alike in many ways. Both could have no real friends, for friendship implied equality.

The United States spends enough on 'defense' to provide every homeless American with a one-million-dollar home.

We have reached the point where multi-millions of people are taking to the streets around the world to protest at their economic plight as the gap between rich and poor becomes a chasm as (calculated) chaos in the financial system has been used as the (calculated) excuse for the biggest transfer of wealth from the many to the few, from poor to rich, from masses to elite, in known human history.

In the decade I had been away something in the fabric of the country had dissolved. America wasn't one country anymore—it was two, or a dozen, or a thousand. The extremes of wealth and color and caste felt more like Cairo or Johannesburg than any American city I remembered.

So what is going on? For the men and women separately, the crew had a higher survival rate than the third-class passengers. But overall the crew had a lower survival rate than the third-class passengers. This is not a trick—the numbers are what they are.

Being poor is a full-time job, it really is.

Time magazine found in a 2000 survey that 19 percent of Americans thought they were in the top 1 percent of wage-earners, and another 20 percent expected to be in the future. "So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top i percent, he was taking a direct shot at them," wrote David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.3

Prioleau was soon afterward accepted into the free mulatto and black slave-holding elite of the city. In the U.S. census of 1840, he was reported as the owner in Charleston of seven slaves, including a married couple, Alfred and Lavinia Sanders, and their two-year-old son. In 1849, Prioleau, apparently needing money, sold the Sanderses' son to another master for $235.

It is a curious phenomena that God has made the hearts of the poor, rich and those of the rich, poor.

I was born a slave-was the child of slave parents-therefore I came upon the earth free in God-like thought, but fettered in action.

God has decreed that there be sick and poor in this world, but in the next it will be the other way around.

Where might is, the right is: Long purses make strong swords. Let weakness learn meekness: God save the House of Lords!

God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.

One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human beings.

There can be no rule of God in the present state of iniquitous inequalities in which a few roll in riches and the masses do not get enough to eat.

We serve God by serving our fellow man; kids are suffering from malnutrition. People are going to the fields hungry. If you are a Christian, we are tired of being mistreated.

God gave a loaf to every bird, But just a crumb to me.

God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.

The unfortunate have claims upon the hearts of those whom God has blessed with affluence.