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Inequality Quotes

Browse 1476 quotes about Inequality.

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Inequality Quotes

“And I did work out something: that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from your table grow fat, they can't look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger - although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.”

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Book:The Threepenny Opera
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“Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification. Living in a community in which we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impact of scarcity. However, a higher level of income inequality in our community can fray our sense of social trust.”

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Book:Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things
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“How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present”

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Book:The Tanners
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“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

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Book:Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
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“Come to yo’ Grandma, honey. Set in her lap lak yo’ use tuh. Yo’ Nanny wouldn’t harm a hair uh yo’ head. She don’t want nobody else to do it neither if she kin help it. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!”

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Book:Their Eyes Were Watching God
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“Making God a man is the consolation prize that our forefathers gave themselves for not being the ones who were each blessed with a vagina.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“Война живет радикализацией схватки. Она является отрицанием равноценности жизни всех людей и потому ведет к различению между другом и врагом, между товарищем по оружию и противником. Тот или иной противник, будучи назван врагом, подвергается раз-индивидуализации, вследствие чего его жизнь признается ничтожной. Поскольку в гражданском состоянии власть распоряжаться насилием, угроза его применения и возможность использования принадлежат государству, то и право различения на друга и врага передается ему, а не остается делом сражающихся. Теперь сражающиеся не вправе решать, кто их друг, а кто враг, т. е. идентифицировать в качестве таковых тех или иных людей.”

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Book:How War Makes Politics Impossible: A Philosophical Analysis of the Two Ways We Deal With "Otherness"
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“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

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Book:1984
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“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

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Author:Terry Pratchett
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“We're not born equal (Bicycle Diaries, 2766) Astrology is the dumbest superstition of all, your date of birth has zero effect on your destiny, but your place of birth, on the other hand, shapes a great deal of your life and character. Someone born in Paris demands from their parents, that they must go on a world tour again this year, someone born in Palestine asks their parents, can they have a small doll this year. Someone growing up in the blackhole of Calcutta, has to labor 100 times harder to make a name, than someone from Cambridge or Copenhagen. Light bends towards gravity, equality bends towards privilege, some dream of touring the moon, some dream of a roof over head. We're not all born equal, some of us are born with more than two functioning brain cells, but no inherited goldmine, still we chart the cosmos on a bicycle, while monkeys confuse lamborghini with life.”

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Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“L'immense écarte qui existe entre les très pauvres et les très riches et qui ne cesse de s'accroître. C'est une innovation des XXe et XXIe siècle. Les très pauvres dans le monde d'aujourd'hui gagnent à peine deux dollars par jour. On ne peut pas laisser cet écart se creuser encore. Ce constat seul doit susciter un engagement.”

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Book:Indignez-vous !
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“It is interesting how the advocates of social inequality think that the wealthy respond to quite different incentives from the poor. If the rich are to be persuaded to work, they require the stimulus of still greater wealth: hence the paramount importance of reducing taxes on high incomes. When dealing with the poor, in contrast, it is held that there is nothing like the prospect of still greater poverty as a work incentive: hence the paramount importance of strictly limiting the benefits to which they are entitled.”

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Book:Towards a New Socialism
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“Low-income countries face unique challenges that contribute to the elevated risk of road traffic fatalities. Insufficient investment in road infrastructure, limited emergency medical services, and a lack of awareness regarding safe road usage are among the key contributors. Bridging the gap in road safety standards between high- and low-income countries requires concerted efforts in the form of financial investment, educational initiatives, and robust regulatory frameworks.”

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Author:Shivanshu K. Srivastava
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“She and Bub went to live with Pop in that crowded, musty flat on Seventh Avenue. She hunted for a job with a grim persistence that was finally rewarded, for two weeks later she went to work as a hand presser in a steam laundry. It was hot. The steam was unbearable. But she forced herself to go to night school—studying shorthand and typing and filing. Every time it seemed as though she couldn't possibly summon the energy to go on with the course, she would remind herself of all the people who had got somewhere in spite of the odds against them. She would think of the Chandlers and their young friends—'It's the richest damn country in the world.' Mrs. Chandler wrote her a long letter and Jim forwarded it to her from Jamaica. 'Lutie dear: We haven't had a decent thing to eat since you left. And Little Henry misses you so much he's almost sick—' She didn't answer it. She had more problems than Mrs. Chandler and Little Henry had and they could always find somebody to solve theirs if they paid enough.”

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Book:The Street
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“Mom,' he said, 'why do white people want colored people shining shoes?' She turned toward him, completely at a loss as to what to say, for she had never been able to figure it out for herself. She looked down at her hands. They were brown and strong, the fingers were long and well-shaped. Perhaps because she was born with skin that color, she couldn't see anything wrong with it. She was used to it. Perhaps it was a shock just to look at skins that were dark if you were born with a skin that was white. Yet dark skins were smooth to the touch; they were warm from the blood that ran through the veins under the skin; they covered bodies that were just as well put together as the bodies that were covered with white skins. Even if it were a shock to look at people whose skins were dark, she had never been able to figure out why people with white skins hated people who had dark skins. It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled 'colored'; a package that called for certain kinds of jobs and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn't know what it was. 'I don't know, Bub,' she said finally. 'But it's for the same reason we can't live anywhere else but in places like this'—she indicated the cracked ceiling, the worn top of the set tub, and the narrow window, with a wave of the paring knife in her hand.”

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Book:The Street
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“Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst. But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. From behind the ghetto walls they see glistening towers of glass and steel springing up almost overnight. They hear jet liners speeding over their heads at six hundred miles an hour. They hear of satellites streaking through outer space and revealing details of the moon. Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. They look at these impressive buildings under construction and realize that almost certainly they cannot get those well-paying construction jobs, because building trade unions reserve them for whites only. They know that people who built the bridges, the mansions and docks of the South could build modern buildings if they were only given a chance for apprenticeship training. They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.”

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Author:Martin Luther King Jr.
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“There is a huge shift to rewiring people from working class families to pursue education that is cheap, but profitable for corporations and corporatized educational institutions, and that is just enough for them to be trained as malleable workers at the service of the ruling class and their needs. We are in a country in which the few rich and privileged get quality education, while everyone else gets cheap training and acquire mediocre skills in the form of certificates of completion. The children of the rich go to Yale and Harvard and other big names, while those from poor working-class families get certificates in this or that skill that they can add to their resumes to be desired by employers. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”

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Author:Louis Yako
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“It was hard to force people to give up their rights to apartments, and predictably, this radical Utopian ideal failed. But it does illustrate how the concept of social injustice in a communist society works: those who have are exceptions, and they should feel guilty and ashamed - the others are entitled to have, too, because it has been promised to them.”

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Book:Café Europa: Life After Communism
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“Oh, I have what a lot of people would probably call communistic thoughts,” said Eliot artlessly, “but, for heaven’s sakes, Father, nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time—or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes. I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.”

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Book:God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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