Top 875 Inequality Quotes & Sayings

Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and the inequality of fortunes could not subsist without religion. Whenever a half-starved person is near another who is glutted, it is impossible to reconcile the difference if there is not an authority who tells him to.

Stark inequality, poverty, and unemployment are driving increased social unrest and, consequently, social and economic risk. Environmental deterioration may well intensify social inequality.

I don't believe that killing the French model in order to become the U.K. or the United States overnight is the solution. You have a big debate on inequality there, and for our society, a lot of inequality would not be bearable.

There are some people who say that they?re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don?t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability?having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.

There have always been two theories about inequality. One is that it reflects just deserts. The other is that there are large elements of exploitation and inequality of opportunities. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the increase in inequality is associated with those negative factors. If it were all social contribution, then when the top did better, they would be contributing to everybody's well-being. That trickle-down hasn't happened. We've seen median income, people in the middle, actually worse off than they were 25 years ago.

I think, unfortunately, we've always lived in a world of massive inequality: inequality between the haves and the have-nots, inequality between men and women that not only exists temporally but geographically as well.

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

You need some inequality to grow... but extreme inequality is not only useless but can be harmful to growth because it reduces mobility and can lead to political capture of our democratic institutions.

The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system.

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.

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.

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.

The same way I'm not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I'm also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.

There may be countries [where] there's no gender inequality in schooling, even in higher education, but [where there is] gender inequality in high business. Japan is a very good example of that. You might find cases in the United States where at one level women's equality has progressed tremendously. You don't have the kind of problem of higher women's mortality as you see in South Asia, North Africa, and East Asia, China, too, and yet for American women there are some fields in which equality hasn't yet come.

Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all - inequality of power. Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable. Like the income tax, it may start off being applied only to the rich but it will inevitably reach us all.

Rising inequality is toxic to growth. High levels of inequality exclude people - both as innovators and customers - diminishing both innovation and demand.

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.

We in America were worried about many problems dealing with economic inequality and political inequality. The Communist Party seemed to be the only political force, both concerned and willing, to take action to stop the threat of fascism abroad and to work for economic and political reform in this country.

Well, you can do whatever you want, but just don’t call it inequality. Put the word poverty there. Because we have many rich people on our board, and when they see the word poverty that makes them feel good, because [it means] they’re really nice people who care about the poor. When they see the word inequality it makes them upset, because [it means] you want to take money from them.

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

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.

Income inequality isn't sexy.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

In the U.S. when people like me started writing things about inequality, the economic journals had no classification for inequality. I couldn't find where to submit my inequality papers because there was no such topic. There was welfare, there was health issues, there was trade obviously. Finance had hundreds of sub groups.

Most people believe that inequality is rising - and indeed it has been rising for a while in a number of rich countries. And there is lots of talk and realization of this. It's harder to understand that at the same time, you can actually have global inequality going down. Technically speaking, national inequality can increase in every single country and yet global inequality can go down. And why it is going down is because very large, populous, and relatively poor countries like India and China are growing quite fast.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

While many Americans agree that 'the system is rigged' economically, few are aware of the ways in which racial inequality has been structured and embedded in our society. This is why candid, fact-based discussions about racial inequality are so desperately needed.

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.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality sexy. For women to find passive, objectified men sexy in large enough numbers to make a pornography industry based upon such images viable, would require the reconstruction of women's sexuality into a ruling-class sexuality. In an egalitarian society objectification would not exist and therefore the particular buzz provided by pornography, the excitement of eroticised dominance for the ruling class, would be unimaginable.

Hillary Clinton, income inequality, it's richest damn woman next to the Kennedy family, and you're trying to tell me she cares about income inequality?

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

They talk about income inequality. I’m for income inequality.

You can call it institutionalized racism or institutionalized inequality, but what I say is that any system that operates to maintain inequality is a corrupt system and must be addressed.

It's really difficult for mainstream - let's say, cable outlets - to talk about things like income inequality, wealth inequality when the advertisers that are funding their shows are the same corporations that want to ensure that the same system continues.

Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.

I was at the World Bank and a commission reviewed our work on inequality for the U.S. Congress or somebody, and the head of the commission said to us: "You are spending taxpayer money to study issues like inequality? Which goes directly against capitalism and growth." That was the perception, that it should not be studied.

We need to invest in healthcare, in education, in the sciences. And in so doing, we will tackle one of the most intractable problems we face, which is gross wealth inequality. We can't fight climate change without dealing with inequality in our countries and between our countries.

The great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake.

Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want to raise taxes on the rich, saying it will solve inequality. It won't. All that will do is significantly reduce incentives to work, save, and invest. But I say inequality is not the problem. The problem is a lack of growth.

You'll also hear about the widening gap in the educated and the uneducated. The liberals will all say, "We must do something about it" and some in our population swoon, "Oh, yes, it's so unfair, and so unfortunate, and we've gotta do something about the inequality." So the Democrats then have their reason to do something about it, and the way they go about it is not trying to make people equal at all. The way they go about it is not even rooted in changing inequality, at the end of the day. The way they go about it is destructive for everybody.

Inequality is on the rise.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

When I was poor and I complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm starting to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.

What is different between national inequality and global inequality is you have another element there that is sometimes forgotten: what matters for global inequality is relative growth rates between poor and rich countries.

We have a reversal of a longstanding trend, from rising inequality across nations and constant or declining inequality within nations, to declining inequality across nations and rising inequality within them.

Here's the interesting thing: the fact that QE and lowering interest rates almost to zero has worsened inequality, does not mean that raising interest rates will help reduce inequality.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

I'm very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It's not a one-sided thing.

Through much of its history, the US did not have high inequality as compared with Europe. Less so, in fact. That began to change in the industrial age, reaching a peak in 1928, after the forceful destruction of the labor movement and crushing of independent thought. Largely as a result of labor mobilization, inequality declined during the Great Depression, a tendency continuing through the great growth period of regulated capitalism in the early postwar decades.

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.

It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.

Getting inequality out there into the consciousness was important. All these political pundits now talking about the 2014 and 2016 elections are talking about inequality.

I think, from a progressive point of view, to have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House, and to have spent the time on Obamacare, which had real benefits, 20 million insured, but not on inequality, was a major cost to the Democratic Party, costing them their majorities, but also a bit of a cost to the country, because it didn't address the fundamental issues that led to Donald Trump and that led to a lot of unhappiness, just the continued widening inequality.

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.

Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

Unequal Democracy is the sort of book to which every political scientist should aspire--it is methodologically rigorous, conceptually serious, and above all, it addresses urgent concerns of our fellow citizens. As Bartels shows, much of what we think we know about the politics of economic inequality is dead wrong. Bartels's perplexing and often unexpected discoveries should help refocus the gathering public debate about inequality and what to do about it.

It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.

we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe ? and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.