Quotes About Inequality

Inequality is a terrible waste of time, a waste of people's resources.

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources.

The upper middle class here still has options for entertainment. We have Internet, Hollywood and books. But for the majority and the masses, there is only TV. A lot of them sit at home and watch TV as they can't afford other forms of entertainment. So, we try to do shows which have inspirational value.

It has been tough when I have been with the national team and we have gone to play in some of the poorer areas in Brazil. You see people come and watch us train or play a match, and then you know some of them are going home with no food on the plate.

I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.

Sexism is deeply rooted in our history and society that waking up and stepping outside of it is like I'm watching 'Night of the Living Dead Part Two' all day, every day.

When your culture comes from watching TV every day, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you.

My mom brought me up by herself, so I was a latchkey kid. I would walk myself back from school and spent a lot of time at home alone, watching TV. There weren't a lot of Latinas - or any women of color. And the ones I saw were usually presented as stereotypes or treated like jokes.

Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

My mother is most attached to my brother because she has the feeling that she could not provide him anything. By the time I was born, at least I got a meal and a half a day, but he sometimes got only water.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

When someone is bothered by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick, and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too deep to be explained in an interview.

In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.

Obama might as well be president of Turkey or Brazil; it does not matter. It's the system that is absolutely flawed, where 25 or 35 or 50 people make multi, multi-billions on building Olympic structures while people live in Barbados and have no roads or clean drinking water. There's something pretty inequitable there.

The smartphone revolution is under-hyped, more people have access to phones than access to running water. We've never had anything like this before since the beginning of the planet.

Some countries have more water than others - some can afford to use clean water to flush their poop away, and some can't.

In my village where I'm from, there's still not running water everywhere. People are still struggling to get clean water.

The Indian elite send their children to expensive private schools, bypassing the public school system. They have their own infrastructure for water, with sumps to store it, pumps to lift it, and fancy filters to de-risk from erratic, polluted government water. Most access private healthcare to bridge the health services deficit.

Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another.

For over a decade, the top 1% of income earners have seen their pay skyrocket, riding a wave of lobbyist-sponsored financial de-regulation. For the remaining 99%, wages have stagnated, and employment has fallen off a cliff.

I'm 21 years old, and it's kind of uncomfortable for me to talk about, but I'm in the 1 percent as far as my income and tax bracket. But now that I'm here, there's no amount of money you can wave in front of my face that will make me understand depriving people of human rights.