Best 305 quotes in «inequality quotes» category

But the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profits.

Capitalism does not merely mean that the housewife may influence production by her choice between peas and beans; or that plant managers have some voice in deciding what and how to produce: it means a scheme of values, an attitude toward life, a civilization—the civilization of inequality and of the family fortune.

Clearly it's not easy for women in modern society, no matter where they live. We still have to go the extra mile to prove that we are equal to men. we have to work longer hours and make more sacrifices. And we must emotionally protect ourselves from unfair, often vicious attacks made on us via the male members of our family.

Closing the inequality gap is a force multiplier.

Currently, the wealthy who have no pre-existing conditions can afford high-quality health care, while the poor and sick are relegated to hoping for and negotiating whatever health care safety net might exist in their area. This neoliberal form of capitalism structuring health care in the United States has led to those with the highest burden of sickness being simultaneously those with the least access to care.

Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.

Division and separation means no harm to the society. It makes everyone unique.

...distinction between growth and development. Aggregate growth in national economic indicators need not mean an improved life for the majority of the people.

Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they seek to address.

Es gibt Menschen, die es zeitlebens einem Bettler nachtragen, daß sie ihm nichts gegeben haben.

Economics has made good on its promise to deliver prosperity and democratic freedom to much of the world, but in doing away with the age-old problems of humanity, it has opened up a crisis of an entirely new variety.

Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.

Early biologists were the social scientists of their times, because their racial descriptions of the human species contain explicit behavioral correlations. Racial attributes were cited to explain social conditions, which then became a natural state of affairs. In the process of their construction, races are deemed part of nature; they are alleged to have been “discovered,” not constructed by an emphasis on particular anatomical attributes. This assumption of the naturalness of race is connected with the pursuit of an explanation of a particular social condition—inequality. Races, as unequal biological entities, must be said to have their peculiar cultures, psychologies, and unequal economic circumstances.

Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

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

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth. Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster.

Free yourself from mental slavery. Break those invisible chains your masters put on your spiritual neck to control you

From this moment there would be no question of virtue or morality; for despotism cui ex honesto nulla est spes, wherever it prevails, admits no other master; it no sooner speaks than probity and duty lose their weight and blind obedience is the only virtue which slaves can still practice.

forget being lady-like & allow yourself to show the world just how unapolegeticaly angry this inequality makes you

For Sonny, the problem with America wasn't segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.

For women as a class, the ability to transform sexual practice, to achieve respect from men as equal human beings and thus break out of their subordinate status, is undermined by the ability of men to escape from the responsibility of acknowledging women's equality. Men's use of women in prostitution stands directly in the way of women's efforts to improve their status.

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so. Parenthetically, what a stale and uninteresting world this would be if perfect equality prevailed! When you seek the taproot of reform movements, you find an urgency to eradicate these innate differences and to make all men equal; in practice, this means the leveling-off of the more capable to the mediocrity of the average. That is not Freedom.

Having privilege means that you have worked hard, but in a world more likely to enable, recognize, and financially reward hard work; that you have suffered, but in a world with fewer forms of suffering, with more mechanisms to prevent it, and stronger remedies when it occurs; that you are not responsible for the atrocities committed by your people in the past, but insofar as you do nothing today, you are complicit in the present created by them.

Happy Labour's day! Let's make a world with better illusions!

Have you ever played Monopoly? It's a board game designed to teach kids capitalism. And what happens in the end? The winner has all the money, and everyone else has nothing. Woohoo! So much fun! That's literally how America works. That's why there are a few super rich people who own almost everything, and tens of millions of dirt poor people who have nothing.

Hay dos panes. Usted se come dos. Yo ninguno. Consumo promedio: un pan por persona.

He realised how poor he was. Yet he had seen wealth, so close by, in lanes filled with commerce, in homes like palaces. The gulf between wealth and poverty was it seemed a condition of every society.

...high inequality is associated with higher rates of crime, greater risk of stress-related illness, and greater political polarization.

He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow." It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.

How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.

How could they do it, how could they?" "I don't know, but they did. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it - seems that only children weep.

Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian, as we'll soon see, throughout hominin history. Inequality emerged when stuff, things to possess and accumulate, was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralists or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies. Why have stratified cultures dominated the planet, generally replacing more egalitarian ones? For population biologist Peter Turchin, the answer is that stratified cultures are ideally suited to being conquerors. They come with chains of command. Both empirical and theoretical work suggest that in addition, in unstable environments, stratified societies are better able to survive resource shortages than egalitarian cultures by sequestering mortality to the lower classes. In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death.

I am he who cometh out of the depths. My lords, you are great and rich. There lies your danger. You profit by the night; but beware! The dawn is all-powerful. You cannot prevail over it. It is coming. Nay! it is come. Within it is the day-spring of irresistible light. And who shall hinder that sling from hurling the sun into the sky. The sun I speak of is Right. You are Privilege. Tremble!

I know. But it’s got to be this way, that she isn’t sure, so people looking at it a long time from now, women and men too, might feel badly, might even weep that at some ignorant time there was once a woman raped who was pressured, even expected, to kill herself.

I am not posing these questions only to the world at large. I query us who own Christ as our life. Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Is there not an obligation upon us to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God is we want to live in his wonderful peace?

I couldn't make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those had little got less. The world ran on this law and only on this.

I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.

I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress. 'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

If there were something that Mother Nature or God could do with money, She or He would have sold immortality to the rich a long time ago.

I have sighed when obliged to confess that either Nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.

I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

If all had to wait for better things until they could be provided for all, that day would in many instances never come. Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.

If trickle-down economics worked, we would not have four food banks in Kensington and Chelsea.

If we want truth and justice to rule our global village, there must be no hypocrisy. If there is no truth, then there will be no equality. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace. No peace, no love. No love, only darkness.

I glance down to what I'm wearing. A crop top, a skirt - it's hot, and it made sense to me. I don't think it looks slutty; I think it looks like me.

I know I could’ve been on the other side of the line too. I refuse to accept injustice and inequality because I know it can be against any one of us, our brothers and sisters and friends and family. I know it’s personal. I know this is our only chance, our only planet, our only shot. And, I know this is my brick.

I'm convinced that not all units of time are equal.

Immobility results when people end up trapped by the social circumstances into which they are born: the networks in which they are embedded fail to provide them with the information and opportunities that they need to succeed.

Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless – one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to her." (Letter, 17 June 1837)