Best 305 quotes in «inequality quotes» category

The most convincing and enduring foe of the global financial economy ultimately is the global financial economy itself. - Ulrich Beck

The only true and sustainable prosperity is shared prosperity.

The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.

The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till out political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich, - a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.

The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone's skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it. [...] Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack of them as a white person are probably part of the problem.

There are places where you can live only when you are healthy, in those places when you fall ill it's the end of you for most people there can’t afford medical care.

The problem is that rich are getting richer by not giving and poor and getting poorer by not receiving.

The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy-all of these work synergistically to weave a complex web of power. Activists have dedicated lifetimes of necessary work to deal with the results of corporate power, by trying to mitigate the results of power: an ever-increasing disparity in wealth and power and continual economic, political, environmental, and human rights crises. For social justice campaigns to be strategic, it is also necessary to examine how privatization, externalization, monopoly, and other corporate power processes have been institutionalized. This institutionalization is exemplified in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and in recent "free" trade agreements which have culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization. An understanding of such institutions provides a necessary tool for achieving the long-term goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.

The quest to remove all inequality is the deadening hand of socialism and results in social stagnation.

There are risks in overstating individuals' freedoms and responsibilities, and then assuming they can and should shape their own lives, and bear all the blame when they fail. This model denies great inequalities in people's skill, knowledge, status and resources.

There can never be equality, so long the heavens have decided together with the darkness in the heart of men, such idealistic desire will never come to fruition.

There is a duality to South Africa, as in all of life itself, that is evident, and as stark as the inequality among its citizens

The rich aren't paying for luxury - they're paying for basic humanity.

There's not a place in the whole world where everyone isn't willing--no, eager--to give a girl up to a man.

The rich and powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real―and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility―certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it―that within a couple hundred years the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed.

There is also the basic inequality of being born either with a natural talent or without one. Clever or stupid. No matter how much you try to argue against it, Dora, we are not born equal. All we can ever strive for is the equality of opportunity for those who have the ability to make the most of it.

There is no economic failure so terrible in its import as that of a country possessing a surplus of every necessity of life in which numbers willing and anxious to work, are deprived of dire necessities. It simply cannot be if our moral and economic system is to survive.

There is today a division of labor between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries whereas peasants lived frugally minding every penny. Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don't really need.

The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.

The trouble with good fortune is that people tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, we think they must have done something to have brought it on themselves. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, what but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness, and to find equality where none may have existed in the past.

The trouble with good fortune is that people tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and as well for others, we think they must have done something to have brought it on themselves. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, what but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness, and to find equality where none may have existed in the past.

The world has enough resources to sustain all lives quite beautifully, yet the disgusting intensity of inequality is only increasing. Because the humans are always looking for gratifications outside their innate self. And to fulfill this primitive urge for instant gratification, more and more businesses are being founded with no valuable principle at their core. Their principle is to provide instant gratifications to the countless privileged neurotics of the world. These neurotics can have the luxury to desire for condom of a specific flavor, while at the same time, in some other corner of the world, countless innocent lives are either surviving on one hard-earned meal a day or dying from starvation.

The world I grew up in was a brutal one. The murder rate was once seven people for every hundred thousand. The average American on minimum wage could barely afford to keep themselves alive on canned food. Millions died over private oil fortunes. Wealthy men and women ran the world for profit. Fools and charlatans got into our Parliaments and set the world on fire. We had everything on paper - checks, balances, freedom, democracy - and yet to live was to be a slave.

The worst form of inequality, is the inequality of ideals A people united by the same ideal, irrespective of religion, social status, race, political preference or sexual, would have the strength to fight for a fairer country.

This is why i hate social media. It gives a voice to people who dont (sic) deserve one.

They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that’s a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.

This is a battlefield, Faith! Women find themselves on battlefields, just as men do. We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight. But fight we must, or perish.

Those who would give us equal opportunity for everybody are threatened by it. They are afraid to lose their privileged positions. They pay lip service to it, they act by half measures and do everything to violate the laws they have themselves instituted to make sure the high class is always high. It never changes, it always goes in a circle, when the oppressed fight and get to the top, and they become the new elite and forget the promises.

Tilly would need a new environment, and good people around her. She had nowhere to go really. They’d seen enough addiction to know coming back to the same didn’t work anyway. But it would be good for her to get back into school somehow, especially since she’d been doing her last years of schooling and was doing alright from all accounts. “She’s a state ward. You could be her guardian? If she agrees? If we can get her at a boarding school or hostel or something? Then you’d only need to have her here in the holidays, maybe?” She might get a residential place at one of the boarding schools. Something. If she could rest, if she recovered, if she wanted. Pg 187

This is so far beyond laughable, it’s almost an English farce.

Those who have the least are usually the ones who know the most about politics.

Today, rather than a democracy we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the formal elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy ... is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal ways of things under capitalism

True democracy focuses on the public interest; it defends the common good and protects its citizens - especially the weak and the vulnerable. We maintain that no democracy can survive without the powerful notions of compassion and public service. The level of wealth inequality in this country has gotten so far out of hand, the quantity of compassion so diminished, that the very future of democracy is at stake." ― & Cornel West

True fasting is not just depriving ourselves of privilege but als osharing sacrificially tob ring an end to the cycles of inequality, an end to creation’s groaning and the groaning of hungry bellies.

Under Muslim law, a man's freedom to divorce his wife is justified in the Koran. This system of the threat of divorce looming over a woman's security is most unsettling to women in my land. It is intolerable that many men stretch this ruling to the utmost of its flexibility, demanding divorce for the most trivial causes, ending with the continuous social degradation of their women. Women do not have the same options, since a divorce in a woman's favour is given only after a thorough investigation into her life. More often than not, women will not be allowed to divorce, even when there is just cause. This female lack of freedom so enjoyed by males creates onesided, often cruel methods of male control and power over their women. The words of divorce slip most easily off the tongue of a man who wishes to punish his wife, 'I divorce thee', or 'I dismiss thee', sending the woman into exile from her married home, often without her children.

Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or values of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless life. Simply put, equality in misery -- that is, equality of result or conformity -- is advanced as a just, fair, and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, except where it avails equality.

Venice was a contrast from Los Angeles itself, where you might see a woman with $15,000 tits, a face frozen in place by Botox, wobbling with her $4,000 Gucci bag right past a child with a sunken belly and exposed ribs encaging a heart too weak to scream.

Walker had broken what in his circles were important taboos: Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.

We “bowl alone,” as sociologist Robert Putnam has put it. Yet this fails to account for a monumental shift in whom we join and for what. We still join together, but now we join for services too expensive to purchase alone—child care, the schools our children attend, recreational facilities, and security...

We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.

We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth.

Well, our economic system "works," it just works in the interests of the masters, and I'd like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the "principal architects" of policy, to borrow Adam Smith's phrase. I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated, whether in the economic or the political system, you know who's going to benefit from the policies―you don't have to be a genius to figure that out. That's why democracy would be a good thing for the general public. But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled―because it's radically anti-democratic. And that can't be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society's investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities. That's a long job, it requires building up an entire cultural and institutional basis for the changes, it's not something that's just going to happen on its own. There are people who have written about what such a system might look like―kind of a "participatory economy," it's sometimes called. But sure, that's the way to go, I think.

we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born

We need more hope. We need more mercy. And we need more justice.

...we should in the interests of accuracy refer not to 'democratic free market capitalism' but to 'plutocratic impunity capitalism'.

...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.

Western capitalist society, and especially my own American society, is one characterized by great inequalities. In any such society, by the nature of the case, the greatest threat to rightful freedom is always the wealth and power of the privileged. The chief task of the state in protecting human freedom should always be to use rightful state coercion to limit the freedom of the powerful and privileged to infringe the rightful freedom of the less privileged and the vulnerable. Political struggles in the modern world are usually fundamentally struggles about whether state power will be used to protect the rightful freedom of all, or instead used to protect the wrongful freedom of the wealthy, powerful, and privileged. Wide social inequality necessarily indicates that these struggles have come out the wrong way, on behalf of the unjust and oppressive freedom of the privileged against the rightful freedom of the majority.

We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had imposed upon us.

We would have already reached the maximum number of people our planet can support, if men and boys were the ones who are generally seen as sex objects.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.