A Quote by Henry George

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.

Henry George

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Attainment Beginning Condition Distribution Distribution Of Wealth Enormous Era Expect Expected Feel Higher Improve Increase Inventions Laborer Lighten Make Marvelous Misery Natural Past Possibility Poverty Power Privilege Producing Progress Real Seeing Social Spring State Strive Thing Those Toil Unequal Vice Wealth Would

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Henry George
American - Economist
September 2, 1839 - October 29, 1897

The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.

Howard Zinn

When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.

Grace Lee Boggs

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

Denis Diderot

The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues-not faction, but rather distraction-there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth.

Plato

The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income. ...The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution ?families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million ?held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013.

Janet Yellen

Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible fo everything that happens around us.

Nhat Hanh

China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable.

Sun Yat-sen

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.

John Cornwell

We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.

Robert Neelly Bellah

We're looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition... doesn't matter if it's death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty. Our problem is that everybody tries to heal each of the individual aspects of poverty, not poverty itself.

Bob Geldof

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.

William James

Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute poverty is increased by it. ... Absolute misery grows while wealth increases.

Joan Robinson

Countries were told they had no incentives because of social ownership. The solution was privatization and profit, profit, profit. Privatization would replace inefficient state ownership, and the profit system plus the huge defense cutbacks would let them take existing resources and an increase in consumption. Worries about distribution and competition or even concerns about democratic processes being undermined by excessive concentration of wealth could be addressed later.

Joseph Stiglitz

The free market is notorious for distributing resources in a highly unequal manner, with great concentrations of wealth at the top and poverty at the bottom. Our social programs, modest compared to those of many other Western countries, play an important role in redistributing some of those resources from the haves to the have-nots.

Linda McQuaig

If our economic system is to survive, there has to be a better distribution of wealth ... we can't have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.

Plato

A Quote by Henry George

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