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Quote by Rutger Bregman

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Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

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Rutger Bregman

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“There is a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful painting in front of you! It is intricate, detailed, a painstaking labor of devotion and love! The colors are like no other, they swim and leap, they trickle and embellish! And yet you choose to fixate your eyes on the small fly which has landed on it! Why do you do such a thing?”

PeopleInspirational QuotesInspirational LifeSelf LoveWisdom QuotesInspirational AttitudePositivityEnvyPositive AttitudeSelf AcceptanceNegativitySelf KnowledgeCritical ThinkingNegative AttitudeThe Nature Of Envy
Author:C. JoyBell C.
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“Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Feed with cold and usurous hand? Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine, And their fields are bleak & bare, And their ways are fill'd with thorns; It is eternal winter there. For where-e'er the sun does shine, And where-e'er the rain does fall, Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall.”

PovertyAusterityChild PovertyHoly Thursday
Book:Songs of Experience
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“Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing. Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men’s hearts. They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality.”

WealthPovertyEqualityInequalityPandemicPlagueCovid
Book:The Plague
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“[We] believe, or assume to believe, that [we] satisfy [our] duty to [humanity] if [we] first provide fully for [our] own material wants and then pay [our] tribute to the universal provider by giving a little to the poor. But if [we] were scrupulously just there would be no poor to whom we could give alms and think that we had realized the merit of benevolence. Better than charity, better than giving of our surplus is conscientious and scrupulously fair conduct and a helping hand in need.”

PovertyDutyCharityVoluntarism
Author:Immanuel Kant
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“What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor. If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.”

PoorPovertyEconomicsStatus Symbol
Book:Thick: And Other Essays
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