Quotes about Inequality

Behold your hard hands and your strong frames, your masters and mistresses have soft hands and delicate constitutions, and white skins; whence this difference; 'it is the Lord's doings and marvellous in our eyes.

While you have strong frames and robust constitutions, you have not the gift of intellect—you could not think for yourselves—you could not provide for yourselves—so the Lord in his infinite goodness has given you kind masters to think for you—[laughter].

Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a nigger-breaker.

In vain will the world seek for equality until it has seen all men through the eyes of faith. Faith teaches that all men, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are.

Hunger is not just an economic problem. It is a moral and spiritual problem.

We suffer from hunger of the spirit while much of the world is suffering from hunger of the body.

'District 9' was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and 'Elysium' is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.

I think growing up in South Africa, and then moving to Canada, I'm just genuinely interested in the difference between the First World and the Third World, immigration, and how the new, globalized world is beginning to operate. All of those things run through my mind a lot.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank they don't like to think of themselves as poor.

Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them better, these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

You don't have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country. If you are born in this country with black skin you are already in jail, you are already confined, you are already watched over by a warden who poses as your mayor and poses as your governor and poses as your President.