inequality quotes

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’re totally illiterate and living on one dollar a day, the benefits of globalization never come to you.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

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.

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.

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.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

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.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

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

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

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.

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

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.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

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.

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

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.

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.

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.

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

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

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

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

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

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

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

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.

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.