Quotes about Inequality

the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

We've been conditioned to associate governing with self-promoting arrogance, corruption, inequality, and inefficiency. But

Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks.

It's only that I feel an injustice has been committed. Why should I have somebody else's malaria and you have my dose of clap?

Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.

The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.

It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits

The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.

Propertied persons typically have large estates and freedom of movement through the society. At the same time, the property of the rich has the effect of crowding and confining the less propertied. The very poor are typically restricted to narrow geographical limits and are regarded as aliens outside them.

Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view-in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets-all places of desolation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master Players have created many millions of such "superfluous persons" (Rubenstein).

People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.

The problem is we have a Wall Street-to-Washington access of power that has controlled the political climate. The donor class feeds the political class who does the dance that the donor class wants. And the result is federal government keeps getting bigger.