Quotes About Inequality

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

The wrong people have all the rights.

I have often wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on a courthouse lawn. Then I realize that the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy, or our consumer economy.

With the exception of Leviticus and Numbers, written by the priestly classes, most of the Bible is written by or about people who are occupied, enslaved, poor or disenfranchised in some way!

Men as a class appear to be at risk, maybe even at high risk.

People who have never been in this downtrodden, impoverished situation can be very unsympathetic because they don't realize what's happening inside. From their secure position—usually in the middle or upper classes—it's easy to call the poor lazy or unmotivated. Such people do not understand the psychological dimension of poverty. The poor have little chance of changing their state without some help from outside.

Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?

The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.

Did you ever feel happy in church? Naw. I didn't want to. Nobody but poor folks get happy in church. But you are poor, Bigger. Again Bigger's eyes lit with a bitter and feverish pride. I ain't that poor.

He looked round the street and saw a sign on a building: THIS PROPERTY IS MANAGED BY THE SOUTH SIDE REAL ESTATE COMPANY. He had heard that Mr. Dalton owned the South Side Real Estate Company, and the South Side Real Estate Company owned the house in which he lived. He paid eight dollars a week for one rat-infested room.

Cross felt that at the heart of all political movements the concept of the basic inequality of man was enthroned and practiced, and the skill of politicians consisted in how cleverly they hid this elementary truth and gained votes by pretending the contrary

Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are doing down the same drain...

Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this. Yes; he would send the kidnap note. He would jar them out of their senses. When

I looked at him and did not answer; there flashed through my mind a quick, running picture of all the squalid hovels in which I had lived and it made me feel more than ever a stranger as I stood before him. How could I have told him that I had learned to curse before I had learned to read? How could I have told him that I had been a drunkard at the age of six?

But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amide the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.

This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured!

All these white folks dressed so fine Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...

They were paying me to distract Bigger with ping-pong, checkers, swimming, marbles, and baseball in order that he might not roam the streets and harm the valuable white property which adjoined the Black Belt. I am not condemning boys' clubs and ping-pong as such; but these little stopgaps were utterly inadequate to fill up the centuries-long chasm of emptiness which American civilization had created in these Biggers.

That cigar-chomping hemorrhoidal bigot who sits astride the riding mower on the two and a quarter acres beside you, he is smart enough to spend his IRA on this stock, so why can't you? Do you want him to have something you do not?

Everyone remembered Lord Lucan's name, but hardly anyone remembered Sandra Rivett, the nanny he clubbed to death. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Gabrielle Mason and her children, also mostly forgotten by the collective memory. Who could name one of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims? Or the Wests'? The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

The rich had always commissioned portraits of themselves but the poor moved invisibly through history.

Whenever I am tempted to dismiss the poor or uneducated for their vulgar tastes, I see the face of old Auntie Braxton, as she stands stock still in front of our picket fence, lips parted to reveal her almost toothless gums, drinking in a polonaise as though it were heavenly nourishment.

Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease.

generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls. One way of grinding this particularly irritating pecking order into the young girls was to teach them the old and ridiculous art of curtsying.