Quotes about Inequality
It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust
— Charles Dickens
Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine.
— Charles Dickens
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!
— Charles Dickens
Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched,than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
— Thomas Paine
In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
— Thomas Paine
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
— Oscar Wilde
Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.
— Oscar Wilde
There's little equity in the Lord's gifts.
— Cormac McCarthy
Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or halfbreed boy maybe twelve years old. He was naked save for a pair of old calzones and makeshift sandals of uncured hide. He glared back at Glanton with a sort of terrified insolence.
— Cormac McCarthy
The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.
— Wendell Berry
The wretch who digs the mine for bread, or ploughs, that others may be fed, feels less fatigued than that decreed to him who cannot think or read.
— Hannah More
The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.
— Harold S. Kushner