Quotes About Inequality

Garbo's role may lack persuasion today; but from the odious butcher insulting and taunting the food queues at his shop, refusing meat to women he found unattractive or unwilling, to the scenes of the unlicensed, gluttonous revelry of the nightlife of the speculator and profiteer, and to the ultimate attack by a starving, angry crowd on a café full of merrymakers - the film was a faithful reflection of the times.

As Michael saw it, capitalism had been cruel to our father, giving him no quarter when he was down, the weight of no money and too much responsibility dragging him under. Which didn't mean he hadn't been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick.

And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

Nationalism, racism, and other toxic prejudices likewise corrode our own global society. We live in a world in which slavery has not been eradicated and, if we are not vigilant, may again flourish under a new dispensation of global inequality.16

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.

The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.

Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously put it: "Actually, there's been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.

I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?

I do not know which is the more nefarious: to ignore social distress, as do the majority of those who have been favoured by fortune and those who have risen in the social scale through their own routine labour, or the equally supercilious and often tactless but always genteel condescension displayed by people who make a fad of being charitable and who plume themselves on 'sympathising with the people.

Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that you have to take malaria pills to go to places where the population doesn't take them, or that you get injections for yellow fever, cholera, typhus and hepatitis? None of the locals are immune to these things. They just suffer them. Drug companies can find prophylactics for rich Western holiday-makers, but not for people who live with disease the other 50 weeks of the year.

You can't make the poor rich, by making the rich poor

Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

When I look back at where I came from, at the school I attended... my classmates for the most part haven't had successful paths - many have had a difficult, chaotic path.

I have had patients die because of lack of insurance.

There's some experiences you can't get in Congress. You don't learn what it's like to turn patients away because they're uninsured, or be passed over in the waiting room because you're on Medicaid.

There is no denying the fact that we live in a patriarchal society, and Bollywood is a patriarchal industry for sure. And it is not too fond of women with opinions.

Society is patriarchal, so film industry by definition is certainly patriarchal. The male gaze dominated.

Under Obama, income growth has been confined almost entirely to those at the top of the income distribution, continuing a pattern that began under President George W. Bush.

In the family pattern, men support boys and women support girls, and because women have far fewer financial resources, there is less money to invest in girls.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.