Quotes About Inequality

At any given time, there are a lot of million-dollar luxury charter boats cruising around the Mentawai Islands finding the most incredible waves. And yet the people on shore are suffering. The whole scene is wrong. As a surf community, we have to do something.

Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

That the caste system must be abolished if the Hindu society is to be reconstructed on the basis of equality, goes without saying. Untouchability has its roots in the caste system. They cannot expect the Brahmins to rise in revolt against the caste system. Also we cannot rely upon the non-Brahmins and ask them to fight our battle.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further, and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

What annoyances are more painful than those of which we cannot complain?

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

I guess I strongly feel that we cannot pretend that the Third World is not part of our world. We cannot say 'OK, there's that problem over there, let's just close our eyes' - we cannot do that.

We should be uncomfortable with the growing gaps in our society, and we cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to these injustices.

Until we fix the deep-rooted problems of economic inequality, we cannot expect young people to experience the best childhood and adolescence.

Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic - the strong attacking the weak.

Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.

It is always the right of the mighty which prevails over the weak, and that is very primitive.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.

Unions have long championed measures to reduce social and economic inequality, and efforts to weaken the labor movement at both the state and federal level have successfully stalled any progress.

I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.

Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you're black.

Ghetto isn't a place. Ghetto is more in the mind and how you feel about your life.

Don't get me wrong: I think that everyone should put forth an effort to do better, but let's face it, some of us are just plain luckier than others.

I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.