Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Tony Schwartz

Quote by Tony Schwartz

“We live in a perilous age. As I write these words, COVID-19 has become a global crisis. Autocrats, including Trump, hold power in a growing number of countries around the world. Democracy and freedom are at greater peril than at any point in decades. The earth is warming at warp speed, and the catastrophic consequences are more evident every day. Despite these warning signs, we are not dramatically changing our habits of consumption or significantly reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. Income inequality—the gap between the richest and poorest people in the world—is rising at a rate that engenders growing fury among the less privileged.”

Quote by Tony Schwartz

Work

Dealing with The Devil, My Mother, Trump and Me

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Tony Schwartz

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Tony Schwartz. more

You May Also Like

“Why do we still cling to the intellectually retarded notion that liberty can be obtained, maintained, or lost at the end of a gun barrel? When you're working 3 minimum wage jobs to make the minimum payment on a pair of socks you bought 12 years ago because your credit card company slapped you with an interest rate that would make a loan shark holler WTF! ... well, no one needs to hold a gun to your head. Your ass has already been sold down the river.”

“The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It's a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

“The Seattle Times reported in 2018 that the median net worth of white Seattleites is $456,000. The median net worth of black Seattleites—and here you should probably beep-boop-boop that therapist again—is $23,000. White net worth in my city is twenty times that of black net worth. If you are one of those people who believes that racism is a thing of the past, never existed at all, or is defined simply as one person being mean to another person, you are claiming that white people genuinely earn—through ability alone, because anything else would be a systemic advantage—twenty times as much as black people. White people are twenty times as good at their jobs, twenty times as skilled, twenty times as deserving. If you believe that, you are racist. That is racism. (Congratulations! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but 2019 is a great time for you guys.)”

“We liberals and progressives need to do a better job at verbalizing what we are for, and not just what we are against. If we want a public option, we must make the case for it. Every time the Republicans start talking about the corruption, waste, and negligence of “Big Government,” we should talk about those same qualities in Big Corporations. If we want to end factory farming, decrease income inequality, and end discrimination in all its insidious forms, we must fight for those things and so much more. It is a subtle but important difference to stand for equality rather than to merely stand against inequality, and I believe that within this positive framework, more transformative arguments can be made.”

“Superior abilities... are the source of everything that is great and useful. Reduce everything to equality and you will bring everything to a standstill. One sometimes hears the same argument expressed today in the idea that the new information economy will allow the most talented individuals to increase their productivity many times over. The plain fact is that this argument is often used to justify extreme inequalities and to defend the privileges of the winners without much consideration for the losers, much less for the facts, and without any real effort to verify whether this very convenient principle can actually explain the changes we observe.”