Top 100 Quotes About Inequality
#1. The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.
Noah Webster
#2. Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.
James Salter
#3. The Savior has suffered not just for our iniquities but also for the inequality, the unfairness, the pain, the anguish, and the emotional distresses that so frequently beset us.
David A. Bednar
#4. Separation is the first cause of inequality.
Katy Tackes
#5. 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
#6. Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.
Yvette Clarke
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.
Thomas Frank
#10. 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
#11. The problem is: income inequality is getting greater. There is no denying that. But this is not a distinction between Owner / Employee. This is a distinction between those with the Rich Employee mindset versus those with the Poor Employee mindset.
James Altucher
#12. 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
#13. Americans were happy to celebrate their super-rich and, at least sometimes, worry about their poor. But putting those two conversations together and talking about economic inequality was pretty much taboo.
Chrystia Freeland
#14. By defining the problem as "hunger," the emergency food system is helping to direct our attention away from the more fundamental problem of poverty, and the even more basic problem of inequality.
Janet Poppendieck
#15. 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
#16. Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children.
Catharine MacKinnon
#17. In a country which had accepted caste distinctions for many centuries, inequality had become an inborn mental concept.
Khushwant Singh
#18. Despite Marc Andreessen's and Peter Thiel's belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice - the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish.
Jonathan Taplin
#19. 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
#20. Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them.
Thomas Sankara
#21. As morally troubling and politically charged as the issue of inequality has become, it's not likely to cause a populist revolt. Most Americans still have a generally positive view of the wealthy and, rightly or wrongly, believe they too can make it to Richistan someday.
Robert Frank
#22. All that a good government aims at ... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.
James F. Cooper
#23. As we said, consciousness is everything. Even now, acknowledging inequality begs one to do something about it--and that is a daunting, albeit righteous, responsibility.
Jennifer Baumgardner
#24. You see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the inequality - but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.
Anna Funder
#25. The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it's violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet.
Eve Ensler
#26. Whether women work in the care sector because the wages are low or whether wages are low because women work there is a question that cannot be answered. But we know that a big reason for economic inequality is that women to a much greater extent work with care.
Katrine Marcal
#27. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.
Mark Helprin
#29. If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when YOU'RE not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle.
Gary Yourofsky
#30. Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. Inequality is everywhere at the bottom of faction, for in general faction arises from men's striving for what is equal.
Aristotle.
#36. What little private tutoring I'd done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality.
Michel Houellebecq
#37. The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.
Anthony Trollope
#38. Gender equality, historically has been predominantly a women's movement for women. But I think the impact of gender inequality and how it's affecting men hasn't really been addressed.
Emma Watson
#39. If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global inequality.
Aviva Chomsky
#40. The worst form of inequality, is the inequality of ideals A people united by the same ideal, irrespective of religion, social status, race, political preference or sexual, would have the strength to fight for a fairer country.
Marcela Re Ribeiro
#41. The more women help one another, the more we help ourselves. Acting like a coalition truly does produce results.
Any coalition of support must also include men, many of whom care about gender inequality as much as women do.
Sheryl Sandberg
#42. Why we are hanging around with inequality concept every day, it is like comparing water with the bread.
M.F. Moonzajer
#43. If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.
Charles Wheelan
#44. The scientific approach uncovers, that Communism does not eliminate the inequality between men, the social injustice, exploitation of man by man and other evils of society - communism merely changes their form and gives birth to new evils, which become eternal fellow-travelers of communism.
Alexander Zinoviev
#45. 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
#46. Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.
Tim Wise
#47. 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
#48. Rising inequality isn't about who has the knowledge; it's about who has the power.
Paul Krugman
#49. Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.
Michael Mandelbaum
#50. 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
#52. Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.
Wanda Sykes
#53. 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
#54. Under capitalism the more money you have, the easier it is to make money, and the less money you have, the harder.Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many.
Adam Smith
#55. A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
#56. There is a duality to South Africa, as in all of life itself, that is evident, and as stark as the inequality among its citizens
Diane Brown
#57. Surely you can see the failings of the system. Inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation--
Allan Dare Pearce
#58. Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.
Herbert Schiller
#59. Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.
Thomas Frank
#60. Bottom dogs have to be persuaded of the desirability of inequality.
William Donaldson
#61. There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege.
Susan Shaw
#62. If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
Jonathan Haidt
#63. Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality - and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.
Margaret Heffernan
#64. Income inequality and wage stagnation finally took their place among the principal moral issues of our time.
David Rolf
#65. Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
Anton Chekhov
#66. 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
#67. The term 'income inequality' is a bit misleading because it suggests in a somewhat pejorative way that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor,
Edward Lazear
#68. I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.
Milton Friedman
#69. Inequality makes the pie of things smaller, yet economists measure the size of the pie not by how much substance it contains but by its price. It is entirely possible, therefore, for economists to measure as growth what most people experience as economic decline.
Moshe Adler
#70. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth. Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster.
Benjamin Barber
#71. I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another.
Amartya Sen
#72. Democracy was a terrifying concept for the old world of Europe, and even the new world of North America, where income inequality was rife. The finest minds of the nineteenth century warned against giving the vote to the workingman, for fear of mob rule or the tyranny of the majority.
George Megalogenis
#73. In life you may be poor or rich, but death is the great equalizer. The greatest communism is in death. Howsoever you live, it makes no difference; death happens equally. In life, equality is impossible; in death, inequality is impossible. Become aware of it, contemplate it.
Rajneesh
#74. 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
#75. In many areas, too, people are having to deal with environmental problems and, with these, threats to their livelihood and worse. At the same time, many others are struggling t get by in the face of inequality, corruption, and injustice.
Dalai Lama XIV
#76. We can not have equilibrium in this world with the current inequality and destruction of Mother Earth. Capitalism is what is causing this problem and it needs to end.
Evo Morales
#77. 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
#79. Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.
Nicholas Kristof
#80. Poverty and wealth inequality are a form of instability into the future.
Tavis Smiley
#81. 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
#82. We're dealing with a crisis of inequality, of joblessness, of underemployment.
Avi Lewis
#83. The first model is Christian, founded on the idea that God wills proportional and harmonic inequalities among the social classes, all of whose members are entitled to at least sufficient living conditions. The second model is based on the erroneous idea that all inequality is unjust.
Plinio Correa De Oliveira
#84. Here's what income and wealth inequality is about. Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made more than 24 billion, enough to pay the salaries of 425,000 public school teachers. This level of inequality is neither moral or sustainable
Bernie Sanders
#85. The rationale that etiquette should be eschewed because it fosters inequality does not ring true in a society that openly admits to a feverish interest in the comparative status-conveying qualities of sneakers. Manners are available to all, for free.
Judith Martin
#86. Diversity there certainly is in the world, but it means neither inequality nor untouchability.
Mahatma Gandhi
#87. It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.
Felix Frankfurter
#88. Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.
Baron De Montesquieu
#89. You want to close the income inequality gap in part? Give us better educated kids out of high school. Give us kids that can challenge and succeed in the challenge with technology. You give us those kinds of kids, and watch the needle move.
Kenneth Langone
#90. I've been talking about things like reversing the rise of inequality and strengthening social
mobility,since before it was cool.
Barack Obama
#91. I put everything I had into it - all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.
Gregory Peck
#92. In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there. We have 300 million poor in India.
Sri Mulyani Indrawati
#93. The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.
Kenneth Langone
#94. political consequences of economic inequality
Anonymous
#95. In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.
Thomas Piketty
#96. We must fight inequality and poverty if we want to re-establish peace and security. Seven million Mexicans live in extreme poverty, which is why I have launched a crusade against hunger. We also have to improve our educational system and stimulate economic growth.
Enrique Pena Nieto
#97. 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
#98. Incentives aren't the only thing that matter for economic growth. Opportunity is also crucial, and extreme inequality deprives many people of the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and government programs that reduce inequality can make the nation as a whole richer by reducing that waste.
Paul Krugman
#99. The left is far more concerned with attacking America - its alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and economic inequality - than with fighting Islamism.
Dennis Prager
#100. Schooling perpetuates inequality by reproducing the class structure in every new generation.
Simon John
