The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‚least advanced‘ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

Racism is real in this country.

If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Capitalism has proven to be the only system that works, but the problem with capitalism is that extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

If you are poor, you are not likely to live long.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

The people are hungry: It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

An important priority for me is a business must get their own house in order. Be or become an agent of positive change in your own enterprise and adopt responsible practices to eliminate the risks that often lie at the root of inequality and poverty.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.