Quotes about Inequality

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?

There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

You born here? Naw. Down south. Jacksonville, Florida. Bad country, boy. Bad, bad country. You know they ain't even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put 'em in jail. I tell people that talk about them sit ins I was raised in jail, and it don't scare me none.

Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

After all a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."