Quotes About Inequality

And so they sit at home, getting fat on the proceedings and here we all are. Our businesses are failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they've done to us. Look what they've done to you.

It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos-

religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don't have economic opportunity

Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical.

The country as a whole had become so hostile to the have-nots that large numbers of the have-nots themselves now voted against their own economic interests.

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

A caste society," wrote U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel 25 years ago, "violates the style of American democracy.… The nation in effect does not have a truly public school system in a large part of its communities; it has permitted what is in effect a private school system to develop under public auspices.… Equality of educational opportunity throughout the nation continues today for many to be more a myth than a reality.

But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure most.

If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people's children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people's children is, however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize.

Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. "If you don't, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you're asking for disaster.

One would not have thought that children in America would ever have to choose between a teacher or a playground or sufficient toilet paper. Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the child of the highest bidder—the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.

That is the great luxury of long-existing and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on anyone. The evil is already set in stone. We just move in.

When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of these children startled us by showing up at school, moreover, there would be no room for them in P.S. 94. The building couldn't hold them.

A polarization of this issue, whereby some insist upon the primacy of school, others upon the primacy of family and neighborhood, obscures the fact that both are elemental forces in the lives of children. The family, however, differs from the school in the significant respect that government is not responsible, or at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in public education.

Phone calls aired on several radio stations voice a raw contempt for the capacities of urban children ("money will not help these children") but predict the imminent demise of education in the richer districts if their funding is cut back. Money, the message seems to be, is crucial to rich districts but will be of little difference to the poor.

Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud, and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance.

Meu amo não podia compreender como toda essa raça de patrícios era tão malevolente e tão terrível.

nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.

It is a melancholy object to walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and all importuning every passenger for an alms.

Crianças que estudam para cangaceiro na escola da miséria e da exploração do homem.

Que culpa eles têm? Roubam para comer porque todos estes ricos que têm para botar fora, para dar para as igrejas, não se lembram que existem crianças com fome.

He wanted her to be as well dressed as the richest lady in Ilhéus; fine clothes would erase her past and hide the stove burns of her arms. But the fine clothes rarely left the closet

Ser pobre implica una más inmediata posesión de la realidad, un atropellar el primer gusto áspero de las cosas: conocimiento que parece faltar a los ricos, como si todo les llegara filtrado.

Un buen esclavo les costaba mil dólares y no duraba mucho. Algunos cometían la ingratitud de enfermarse y morir. Había que sacar de esos inseguros el mayor rendimiento. Por eso los tenían en los campos desde el primer sol hasta el último; por eso requerían de las fincas una cosecha anual de algodón o tabaco o azúcar.