Quotes About Inequality

They call my country the land of the free, but I was born poor and black, and there wasn't much free about that .

You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city's gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.

If you can see, hear, feel, and think, you should know that King Dollar rules the United States, and that the workers are robbed and exploited in this country to the heart's content of the masters. If you are not deaf, dumb, and blind, then you know that the American bourgeois democracy and capitalistic civilization are the worst enemies of labor and progress, and that instead of protecting them, you should help to fight to destroy them.

Away with the hypocritical horror on the part of capitalist, labor leader, and politician.

all communities divide themselves into the few and the many. the first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.

She'd always said that there must be something very bad about money, because those who needed it most never had it, and so many who had it would do such awful things to get more of it. The

there is very little connection between law and justice.

Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of forty-two years. They are thirty-five times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. In

What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor as such differences become less, it grows feeble and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.

Warren's guests had learnt about poverty, not from being poor themselves, in places where you did not hear the screams and yelling of help.

The American Dream is alive and well for some, but not all Americans. Here in South Carolina, rural hospitals are closing, schools are underfunded, and our coasts are threatened by offshore drilling. We need a Senator who's fighting to improve the lives of South Carolinians rather than focusing on interests in Washington D.C.

Two million dollars is only small when you're talking about Washington, D.C.

Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans - working families, children, the elderly, the poor - or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying in to Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. There's a message there.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

Capitalists make money by exploiting labor and by externalizing the costs of the wastes produced by the productive process by imposing the wastes on the environment.

You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency.

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it.

Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point.

Poverty wastes people; it wastes opportunity.