Quotes About Inequality

The world wants to define me by my mammary glands and melanin. It is just fascinating that Michael Mann has never been asked what it is like to be a white male filmmaker.

In bad times, the rich usually get richer.

The rich live hand-to-mouth too-just on a higher level.

The world has also learned that economic growth, by itself, cannot close the gap between rich and poor.

dude im starting to think that life is very unfair

They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks . Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.

both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation's railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods.

In a nutshell, over the decades the national policies of the Republicans had raped the region while the actions of many state and local Democrats too often were designed to preserve the assets of a select few at the expense of just about everyone else.

Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, "the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100."57

The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs. One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig, he was a chief commissioner of police.

Religion was by and large constructed by men, and I had yet to find a man who was logical.

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.

Why Banning Miller, what a vision you are in your fine dress. Must've taken a dozen slaves a dozen days to get you into that getup. 'Course, your daddy tells me it takes the space of a schoolboy's wink to get you out of it again.

We can no longer waste time and money. Every day, more than 2 000 girls in America, age 15-19, give birth - in the wealthiest, most educated nation in the world! Neither you nor I should accept this statistic.

had shocked him into speechlessness to realize that down-and-outs in New Jersey expected to have more in the way of amenities than coal miners and sharecroppers in most of West Virginia, and that people in the North believed that there was no one, anywhere, who still had to go out in the cold in the middle of the winter to use a chemical latrine.

Then, a female was politically classed with infants, idiots, and lunatics, as 'naturally incapacitated… and therefore… so much under the influence of others that [she] cannot have a will of her own'.3 That is why there were such strict regulations governing her behaviour at university (and beyond), not only to protect her moral and physical welfare, but to defend good men, such as undergraduates and lecturers, from temptation and involuntary folly.

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

Unfortunately, Hoover's calculation rested on an oversight: The distribution of America's new wealth was severely lopsided, the overwhelming share flowing directly into the bank accounts of the very rich, leaving the poor with few or no gains at all.

Not poor? How can you sit there and say that with a straight face? Why I remember your momma told my momma once that your daddy got drunk and spent his paycheck and you had to pick up beer bottles alongside the road for lunch money and you had holes in the bottoms of your shoes. You had to line them with newspapers. If that ain't poor, I sure don't know what is.

You never saw them; you never met them; you were never touched by their suffering except on the evening news or at the occasional fundraiser. They were what they were because they were uncivilized, unteachable, underprivileged and unsalvageable. They were the underclasses, and you found a use for them, because without their cheap labor and their primitive wars, your own world of mirrored towers and imported luxuries and megabuck negotiations could never exist.

The already privileged receive privileged educations. The disadvantaged receive inferior educations, and then we blame them for their failure.

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions." [ Why Societies Collapse , ABC Local, July 17, 2003]