Quotes About Inequality

Runaway climate change would condemn millions to a life of poverty and cause us to fail to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030. This is not an acceptable outcome.

Inequality in the developed world fell for most of the 20th century; we can make it fall for most of the 21st century, too. But it won't happen without sustained pressure on politicians from electorates.

People make you feel like a bad guy for asking for seven quid for your album, like you are slapping them in the face, when they'll go and pay two grand for a scarf somebody knitted in a sweat shop and stitched a designer label on.

Anyone that I know who wants to work in these fields by the sweat of their brow, the bend of their back, picking lettuce and fruit, can do it. We don't want those jobs. Let's be real about that.

The north of Sweden is very socialist and poor. They feel left out and despise Stockholm in many ways because Stockholm has become new liberals and much more Americanized.

When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.

When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger.

People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism gives greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest that favours the middle classes, an outpouring of the dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie.

The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan, or Jamaica. But really, there's enough to share, when you check it. It's not that complicated, really. It's probably less thinking and more feeling that's required.

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

When the mayor of Sao Paulo wanted to increase bus fare by 21 centavos in 2013, the country erupted in the largest mass protests in its history. It wasn't a dramatic hike - just nine cents - but a perfect symbol of the increasing burdens on the working poor, forced to fend with an inadequate system, insensitive to their plight.

Food banks have become such a powerful symbol in part because they're inescapable.

Live Below the Line raises real money to help the world's poorest people, but it is also a symbolic demonstration aimed at highlighting - not replicating - the plight of the world's poor.

I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

Whether rich people make money or lose money, they get no sympathy from the public.

Racism is just the symptom, but the fight is economic.

When children are hungry, sleepy from a night spent fighting untreated asthma, or hobbled by symptoms of undiagnosed illnesses, they are less likely to do well in school.

Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.