Inequality In Quotes

#1. a very substantial and growing inequality of capital income since 1980 accounts for about one-third of the increase in income inequality in the United States - a far from negligible amount.

Thomas Piketty

#2. The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.

Alice Rivlin

#3. An inequality of property is the root and foundation of innumerable evils; it tends to derision, and to keep asunder the social feelings that should exist among the people of God. It is a principle originated in hell; it is the root of all evils. It is inequality in riches that is a great curse.

Orson Pratt

#4. Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence.

Pope Francis

#5. In preindustrial times, according to one study, inequality in landed property was greater in the Appalachian backcountry than anywhere else in America,

John Alexander Williams

#6. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#7. Since I became First Minister, I have made clear my priority to alleviate poverty and tackle inequality in Scotland. Ensuring that everyone can do better in life will not only make Scotland fairer, but it will also make it a more prosperous place.

Nicola Sturgeon

#8. Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?

Simon Kuznets

#9. Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.

Adam McKay

#10. Government doesn't have to be the enemy, but too much government has produced a new kind of inequality in America: opportunity inequality.

Marco Rubio

#11. Today, the United States is No. 1 in corporate profits, No. 1 in CEO salaries, No. 1 in childhood poverty and No. 1 in income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world.

Bernie Sanders

#12. The art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.

John Ruskin

#13. American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

Tony Judt

#14. A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.

Lawrence Lessig

#15. You can't solve a problem as complex as inequality in one legal clause.

Theresa May

#16. Beware of critics of education who cloak their desire to protect privilege (and inequality) in the garb of educational reform.

Michael S. Roth

#17. Early investment in the lives of disadvantaged children will help reduce inequality, in both the short and the long run.

James Heckman

#18. Because Katrina put it out there, no one can play the pretend game anymore that there isn't poverty and inequality in this country. The Millions More Movement - Katrina gives it added significance.

Marc Morial

#19. I have to admit, I was quite insensitive to the issue of gender inequality in the workplace until a few years ago.

Naina Lal Kidwai

#20. The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights ... This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another.

Milton Friedman

#21. There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

Bernie Sanders

#22. Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

Barney Frank

#23. Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return.

Doug Casey

#24. Income and wealth inequality in America today has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Corporate

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#25. Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.

Bryan Stevenson

#26. Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

Derek Bok

#27. There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.

John F. Kennedy

#28. A tight-money policy reinforces inequality in two ways. Its high interest rates disproportionately reward the rich, and the resulting unemployment disproportionately punishes the poor.

Linda McQuaig

#29. The equality among all members of the League, which is provided in the statutes giving each state only one vote, cannot of course abolish the actual material inequality of the powers concerned.

Hjalmar Branting

#30. Meritocracy is a social arrangement like any other: it is a loose set of rules that can be adapted in order to obscure advantages, all the while justifying them on the basis of collective values. pg. 199

Shamus Rahman Khan

#31. Income inequality is worse in towns run by Democrat mayors than in towns run by Republican mayors.

Rand Paul

#32. I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice. The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.

Bell Hooks

#33. Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.

Nicholas Kristof

#34. If freedom led to wider inequality, I would prefer that to a world in which I got artificial equality at the expense of freedom. My objective, my god ... is freedom of individuals to pursue their own values.

Milton Friedman

#35. The miracle is therefore a sign of love among equals. Equals should not be in awe of one another because awe implies inequality.

Foundation For Inner Peace

#36. Consistently rated the most peaceable of all countries in the world by the Global Peace Index, Iceland has reduced its military expenditure to zero, has no armed forces, and has reduced the inequality gap between rich and poor.

Scilla Elworthy

#37. I think the issue of income and wealth inequality is in fact a moral issue.

Bernie Sanders

#38. The Socialists have found good the equality, and bad the inequality. Good the servants and bad the tyrants. I crossed the threshold of good and evil in order to live my life intensely. I live today and can not await tomorrow. The wait is of peoples and of humanity, so could not be my affair.

Renzo Novatore

#39. There's something in the cross that says this is not just about my "salvation" but about the "salvation" of all those who suffer injustice and inequality.

Mel White

#40. Through fetishizing the inequality embedded in the romance story, women have somehow become convinced that being in, or even vying for, a relationship is something we should want
regardless of whether that relationship might hold equal power or doesn't serve us.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

#41. The historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits and at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.

Stephanie Coontz

#42. Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.

Mary Douglas

#43. The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.

Steven Rattner

#44. We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.

Tyler Cowen

#45. Income inequality increased quite sharply in the United States during the 1920s, however, peaking on the eve of the 1929 crash with more than 50 percent of national income going to the top decile -

Thomas Piketty

#46. There's still a massive inequality between the genders. If you look at the trajectory of a male actor's career, there's no hesitation or hiatus. But women after the age of 35 to 40 are rarely placed in the centre of the story.

Juliet Stevenson

#47. Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.

Paul Ryan

#48. It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.

Thomas Piketty

#49. We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

Guilherme Leal

#50. The natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their efforts equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.

Thomas Malthus

#51. What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.

Charlotte Bronte

#52. To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you'll need in the society of the future.

Thomas Frank

#53. We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt, that isn't weakened by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.

Barack Obama

#54. Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.

Frank Chodorov

#55. Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

Fareed Zakaria

#56. Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.

George Bernard Shaw

#57. America has long raised political and cultural cognitive dissonance to an art form. We are capable of living with enormous inequality and injustice while convincing ourselves that we are in fact moving toward what Churchill called the "broad, sun-lit uplands."

Jon Meacham

#58. You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

Jodi Picoult

#59. The biggest danger I feel are an emerging group of Westernised, educated, champagne socialists and latte liberals who pontificate about social inequality, democracy and freedom in the comfort of their condos.

Calvin Cheng

#60. Overwhelming and astounding inequality,especially when it has an element of the unattainable, arouses far less envy than minimal inequality, which inevitably causes the envious to think: I might have been in his place.

Helmut Schoeck

#61. All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

Thomas Piketty

#62. I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society.

William Julius Wilson

#63. In all our times together so far, this was the first time I felt we were enjoying ourselves, without strain or any sense of difference of age or deference, concession or inequality. It was, I thought afterwards, the first time we had met as ourselves, untrammelled, unguarded and in tune.

Aidan Chambers

#64. Our outrage at inequality is primal. But primal emotions are not always noble ones. Of course, when I see a colleague receive some award, I covet it. But this is not me at my best, and these are not the feelings we would instill and promote in our children.

Sendhil Mullainathan

#65. Inequality may linger in the world of material things, but great music, great literature, great art and the wonders of science are, and should be, open to all.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#66. The benefits of feminism have been unequally distributed, because the move toward gender equality and gender neutrality has been countered to a large extent by the increase in economic inequality.

Stephanie Coontz

#67. A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#68. Regardless of how you interpret the facts, you have to come to the conclusion that inequality is widening in the US and in almost every other country.

Robert Reich

#69. Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.

Samantha Trenoweth

#70. Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.

Mordecai Richler

#71. The best solution to income inequality is providing a high-quality education for everybody. In our highly technological, globalized economy, people without education will not be able to improve their economic situation.

Ben Bernanke

#72. Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?

Zadie Smith

#73. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality.

Steve Sailer

#74. Nothing is as unique as sex in nature; it is full of enjoyment, pleasure and happiness. There is no discrimination, no exclusion, no inequality and no racism.

M.F. Moonzajer

#75. In effect, the poor person is a rich person left to fend for him or herself, without the support of institutions that help the person to take 'good' decisions.

Rabbi Cohen

#76. The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

George Orwell

#77. The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.

Noah Webster

#78. I cannot see that keeping the status quo intact would help in any way to solve the problems of inequality or suffering in this world. I would go for taking action towards change instead of accepting the inevitable.

Elina Juusola

#79. I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!

Mary Hays

#80. Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.

Frances O'Grady

#81. Rural communities in Africa, South Asia and Latin America are where the majority of hungry people are and the inequality that exists between women and men in these communities is holding back progress.

Dionne Warwick

#82. I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Eugene V. Debs

#83. Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#84. In a country which had accepted caste distinctions for many centuries, inequality had become an inborn mental concept.

Khushwant Singh

#85. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

Timothy Noah

#86. ...we should in the interests of accuracy refer not to 'democratic free market capitalism' but to 'plutocratic impunity capitalism'.

Robert Wade

#87. [T]he full and complete development of a country, the welfare of the world and the cause of peace require the maximum participation of women on equal terms with men in all fields.
[Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979)]

United Nations

#88. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.

Thomas Piketty

#89. It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.

Bryant McGill

#90. We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living.

Amartya Sen

#91. But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.

Tony Judt

#92. The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it.

Bertrand Russell

#93. As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.

Nursultan Nazarbayev

#94. If we agree that God did not create poverty then, in my opinion, it came in to being as a consequence of human rights violations.

Q.M. Sidd

#95. the future could hold in store a new world of inequality more extreme than any that preceded it.

Thomas Piketty

#96. Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

Ben Bernanke

#97. agreements were documents of inequality codified under American law, which had always favored property rights over liberties of the individual. This made any landlord the most important person in his or her tenants' lives, capable of enacting terrible vengeance on the slightest whim.

Jarett Kobek

#98. Popular privileges are consistent with a state of society in which there is great inequality of position. Democratic rights, on the contrary, demand that there should be equality of condition as the fundamental basis of the society they regulate.

Benjamin Disraeli

#99. We still have gaps that are rooted in gender inequality. Certainly we have discrimination against the LGBT community.

Hillary Clinton

#100. I spent a lot of time developing in books why worshipping separately actually impacts inequality, economic, social, on and on. So I really do believe there are huge advantages to being together even though it's difficult, even though we have a lot to learn.

Michael Emerson