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.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

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

We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn’t do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.

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

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

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.

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.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

Every country must be absolutely free to adopt the type of economic, political and social system that it considers convenient.

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn’t available.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It’s not a popular position.

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

Nothing in the world is irreversible, not even capitalism.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

Racism is real in this country.

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.

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.

From 1945 to 1974, the Western world – including America – was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.

The rise in the price of gold is a sign that capitalism has stumbled.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that’s been discriminated against, knows what it’s like.

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.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

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.

It’s very difficult for the American people to believe that our government, one of the richest on Earth, is also one of the stingiest on Earth.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

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

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

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

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

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

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

The Lord commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.

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.

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.

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

The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

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

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

The environmentalists say capitalism is killing our oceans, air, land, and forests. Capitalists argue that they provide food, fuel, and building materials for a growing world.

Now, anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well, hoping that it’s going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up, you’ll never see it.

Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth’s treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.