Best Inequality Quotes

"The only ones the machines will truly liberate are the rich, whose relationship with these technologies that save money and boost profits is painfully similar to their relationship with human workers themselves."

"I didn't do anything publicly until COVID, nothing publicly. And I'll tell you why I went public during Co because at the beginning of COVID, I knew immediately this is going to cause the biggest and fastest ever increase in inequality."

"I went public during Co because at the beginning of COVID, I knew immediately this is going to cause the biggest and fastest ever increase in inequality."

"Inequality has been reduced before. You can look at the situation after the Second World War. Inequality doesn't have to only go up."

"Extreme inequality and wealth concentration undermine the ability of humanity to stop climate breakdown."

"Inequality and relative poverty create problems for people's health through mechanisms such as stress and anxiety."

"The poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality."

"Citizens United... we've created this separate but equal democracy for the very very rich."

"The real losses came from those who didn't have millions to lose."

"Inequality is what is truly tearing society apart, not identity politics."

"The people actually living in Russia’s most resource-rich territory are far from rich themselves."

"We went through a worldwide health crisis and a worldwide recession, and yet, you have some people, the rich people, who became now significantly more rich, while you have the majority of the world, average people, who are now poorer than they were before."

"The pandemic constitutes a ginormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich."

"Conflict and inequality are the engines of growth and innovation, which mostly benefit the least advantaged in the long run."

"This is wage inequality by race and gender in a nutshell."

"Talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn't."

"If you don't fix inequality, the economy will get worse and worse."

"The lie that inequality is the result of inequity means that the solution will be to destroy standards."

"We're standing at the finish line and evaluating the racers as they come in, but the reality is the starting positions were completely unfair to begin with."

"Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, 'Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."

"We don't have one rule of law in this country, and I agree, we have two: one for the rich and powerful and a second for each and every one of us."

"My morality is more concerned with inequality than validations from above."

"People that oppose capitalism will point to rising inequality, the exploitation of natural resources, and the erosion of human rights in the name of maximizing output as equally important drawbacks."

"Capitalism is unstable, capitalism is unequal, and capitalism is fundamentally undemocratic."

"The driving factors are wage stagnation with rising cost of living and inequality, which means there's more competition and desperation for fewer good jobs."

"We were smarter than the underfunded schools you put us in, but you had your knee on our neck."

"Massive amounts of inequality may not be politically sustainable."

"Every single country rations care. The question is, how do you ration it and how do you prioritize it? In the U.S., we do what's called a 'wallet biopsy'. The richer you are, the more likely you are to get good health care. In other countries, they ration based on need."

"You need some inequality to have innovation and create new businesses, to have the incentives that people need to continue to invent."

"Inequality may be different from solving the problem of poverty."

"Inequality might not be that much of a problem if it was fairly easy for people to move up or move down depending on the value they added to the economy."

"Inequality is corrosive of a sense of commonality and common purpose."

"In a world where 34,000 children die every single day from poverty and preventable diseases, and where 50% of the world's population lives on less than two dollars a day, one thing is clear: something is very wrong."

"Some people are just born with disadvantages and some are born with advantages. You have to just kind of play the cards that you're given and you do the best with what you have."

"We can see cycles of poverty and inequality play out in real time with no clear answer of how these cycles will be interrupted."

"Capitalism is built on white supremacy. It's built on patriarchy. It's built on cisheteronormativity, on ableism, on settler colonialism, on imperialism."

"The only answer to this moment is to reduce the wealth and power of the people on top."

"If we took half the wealth of the richest and made it available to the bottom half, it would transform their lives."

"There is absolutely no excuse for any human being on this planet to exist in the caustic condition of poverty or socio-economic inequality not in the 21st century."

"Poverty and inequality is an economic precondition simply for disease, violence, disorder, and lower public health."

"Inequality is really systemically speaking the leading cause of death on this planet."

"Capitalism is incredibly exploitative and incredibly unequal."

"China’s Gini coefficient went from 0.3, which is very equal, to 0.47, matching America's inequality, but that's a success story because it comes from development."

"The world we live in, as brutal and unequal as it is, has been made more humane by class-conscious movements."

"The obsession that we have had with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency."

"Powerful people do what's best for powerful people and seldomly is that what's best for the rest of us."

"Every single capitalism we have a record of has built into it a tendency to ever greater inequality that is only periodically interrupted by revolts from below."

"Any societal structure that results in a racial inequality is itself racist."

"If 10% of the population is 40% richer doing nothing, then who's poorer? It must be everybody else."

"We have to be very intentional as policymakers about whether these technologies serve to deepen or bridge those inequalities and biases."

"Working together allowed us to transcend our natural constraints, Marx argued, but the way labor is organized leads to massive inequalities."

"People who have more money have more ability to be out of custody, and people who have less money do not have the ability to be out of custody."

"Ang says he's seen with his own eyes the power imbalance between Benders and non-benders... Punishing all Benders as if they themselves committed these acts when they have not is unjust."

"Inequality is not about certain bad people; it's about what changed about the system."

"Everybody knows the inequality is getting worse. Well, almost everybody, anybody serious anyway."

"The current setup sees an enormous flow of wealth and assets from ordinary families to the rich."

"The key to tackling inequality lies in reactivating social mobility but to do that, citizens' basic needs in terms of health and education must be catered for first."

"The reality of capitalism is that the profits and resources that people receive at the top of the business rarely trickle down to those at the bottom."

"The real problem is not inequality; it's poverty."

"The middle class is being systematically dismantled. People are getting screwed."

"It’s unfair to expect the poor to liberate the rich when the poor cannot liberate themselves."

"47.8% of the world's wealth is now in the hands of just 1.2% of people, who are around 62.5 million adults with a net worth of over 1 million US Dollars."

"The ideal economic outcome is to make the poor people richer, but sometimes this has the side effect of making already wealthy people even wealthier."

"Day in, day out, we get up and we think: what changes, small they don't need to be radical, they need to be right, that will give us higher growth and low inequality."

"We should be trying to do anyway is we've got to get growth up, we've got inequality down, and we need to stop pretending those things are in tension."

"If there's no tolerance for inequality, it's possible that there's no way of generating wealth because wealth has to start somewhere and then be distributed."

"I think the people that I'm concerned about are the people who are busting their ass and getting absolutely nowhere."

"This pandemic actually exacerbate this inequality in our nation."

"Wealth and income inequality are the biggest moral crisis, and I'll also say it's a spiritual crisis in America today, all around the world."

"The average garment laborer receives just 0.6% of a piece of clothing’s retail price."

"Is the US a functioning democracy? It costs two billion to become president. They spend over 800 billion a year on arms, yet can't afford universal healthcare or a program for the 17 million children that go to bed hungry."

"The real question is why is opportunity being hoarded, how are we allowing that to happen, and what do we suspect about each other as our reason to cohere breaks down."

"The average American is suffering while these CEOs are profiting, and it's not working."

"In America, poor people get screwed unless they own assets."

"I don't think inequality is our biggest problem; I think our biggest problem is stagnation."

"If we have the opportunity and the resources, to find ways to bridge the gaps of inequity."

"Slavery could not have existed if people didn't believe the lie that there were inferior people to them."

"The rich possess a disproportionate ability to reside in expensive and beautiful housing developments."

"Equality doesn't exist here; the poorer you get, the poorer you stay."

"Billionaires made more money during the pandemic, and you lost your job and are facing eviction. How is this sustainable?"

"Inequality is growing... how did that happen? How did the conversation about social democracy sort of rise? Well, I think that's on the rise because the conversation on wealth inequalities is becoming more prominent as well."

"Extreme automation under capitalism is disempowering for the many and inconceivably profitable for the few at the top."

"If there is no inherent privilege, then the privilege has to be manufactured."

"The pandemic also exacerbating existing inequality, black workers, women, and the low-income hit harder than others."

"I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly. Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent, and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant because this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand."

"Wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us."

"Leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values and changes in people's behavior that work against their own economic interests, but that may ultimately restore the American dream."

"The richest 1% of the world's population controls 40% of the world's wealth."

"We're at a point that your numbers verify, in which the capitalist system has reproduced the kinds of grotesque inequalities that we associate with everything from the Versailles Palace of the late Louis back to the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt."

"We probably need to find ways to redistribute some of the wealth away from the insanely wealthy people."

"Remember again to make a rainbow, you have to have rain and you also have to have sun."

"You need a certain number of units of inequality to produce a certain number of units of wealth."

"Working Americans deserve a say in how the country's vast wealth will be used, and that will be possible only when inequality is reduced, corporate and big-money donors are banished from politics, and lawmakers are truly accountable to the people."

"Socio-economic inequality kills about 18 million people a year."

"A society like the United States facing widening inequality can turn it around if it wants to."

"You have massive skyrocketing worse than Gilded Age inequality which has only gotten worse during the pandemic."

"His luxury lifestyle contrasts with the lives of ordinary North Korean people, who struggle to feed their families while the Supreme Leader spends his evenings partying and feasting on more expensive food."

"Socialism is in opposition to unregulated capitalism because they see the inequality in the world."

"Living under capitalism, seeing the homeless on every street corner and seeing the elderly decide between medicine or groceries for the week, suffering under mountains of all sorts of debt, students or otherwise, and fearing for their lives from police brutality all this can make a person numb."

"There is no economic law that says only the private sector and the market can respond to people's needs. The inequality within Western countries cannot last for much longer."

"All animals are equal, but only some animals are more equal than others."

"The government's all over the world, they have different rules for different people...The politicians are picking the winners and losers."

"The Occupy movement... changed the discourse about inequality."

"The world will eat you up and spit you out, and no matter what, everyone is born at a different difficulty setting or level in life, but the world owes you no excuses."

"Having rich parents is almost a necessary condition for getting ahead in our society."

"Meritocratic inequality... induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism verging on despair."

"Nobody can be forced to make a choice that is counter to their interests, in order to get access to some resource they need, thus trapping them in a perpetual cycle of inequality."

"The core factor driving instability is expanding inequality."

"The inequality problem exists on this coast is extraordinary, where you have the richest people in the world cohabiting with the world's destitute in such proximity."

"Unequal outcomes are inevitable; in fact, they are the inevitable consequence of a fair system."

"We know that low-income communities particularly communities of color do bear the brunt of the climate crisis."

"We are living in an upside-down world where bodies litter the beaches where billionaires bask."

"The impact of AI and these technologies is asymmetric, and everybody doesn't get the same benefit."

"I have huge concerns about the bottom fifty percent of the pyramid that they're not being taken care of."

"We have known that for a long time now, the system has treated racialized, Black, and Indigenous Canadians differently."

"There is a two-tier justice system in this country, not because a sitting president who sent his own supporters to their deaths and tried to overthrow American democracy is under indictment by three independent prosecutors and four jurisdictions but because thousands of people languish in jails across this country because they don't have the resources that he has to fight."

"Riots are the children of protest, and protest is the child of injustice."

"The heart of the problem is that capitalism perpetuates human hierarchy, human inequality."

"Climate change will affect the poorest the most, that's absolutely true. But what you have to remember is everything bad affects poor people most."

"Our universities were not supposed to be about taking the top one percent and the wealthiest households and turning them into billionaires. We were supposed to be about taking good kids and giving them remarkable opportunities."

"Important people can do important people things; unimportant people can make do with their cage."

"The whole point is that the Squid Game is supposed to be a temporary reprieve from the inequality of life under capitalism."

"Critical Race Theory is really just a term to describe a loose collection of academic theories to describe our understanding of racial inequality."

"It's not that they are getting infected more often, it's that when they do get infected, their underlying medical conditions... lead to a higher death rate."

"Canada has far less poverty, which says something about various types of inequality."

"It's also the world we live in, but that doesn't mean we can sit idly by and ignore the major problems of our daily climate change, like inequality."

"Inflation is intimately connected to record corporate profits and widening inequality."

"White men's roads through black men's homes." - Professor Deborah Archer

"Money goes up, money goes down, but usually, the big guys hardly feel it."

"The world is changing, wealth inequality is soaring, the cultural gap between the elites and the masses is widening, and society seems more polarized than ever before."

"Every society has inequality, every society has hierarchies... but you have to have upward mobility and that's when you lose upward mobility, capitalism itself loses its credibility."

"The technologies are already existing in systems of structural oppression, structural racism, global social, political, and economic inequality." - Sophia Noble

"Capitalism indeed produces inequality, but it also remediates dire privation for the first time in the entire painful temporal span comprising life here on Earth."

"This was a time of huge inequality; women were still limited in what they could do in society, homosexuality was illegal, and the Civil Rights Movement was being fought in painful, bloody battles across the country."

"Extreme inequality creates a dual psychology... I want to help, and I can't afford to not remain at the top."

"A strong middle class built this country, and now the country, economically, is kind of dying in a lot of ways through inequality."

"AI is a tremendous force for good and a potential source of inequality and new colonization, necessitating serious consideration of its impacts."

"If the government was prioritizing people with money and status and leaving out impoverished people like these new Blip refugees, now the Flag Smashers make a lot of sense."

"Reproductive justice links reproductive rights with the social, political, and economic inequalities that affect a person's access to reproductive care."

"We know exactly who will be hurt most by Texas law... particularly women of color and poor women will be most affected."

"Many are poor not because they are lazy, not because they are addicted to drugs, not because they don't value education; they're poor because they can't escape the history of their ancestors."

"The world's not fair; we are not fighting on an equal playing ground."

"Every day in lockdown, we're having kids who are not in school, not getting an education, you're widening inequality."

"The system is rigged in such a way that it doesn't require any individual in the system to be racist in order for the system to spit out racist outcomes."

"Capitalism now overvalues and overpays knowledge workers, and undervalues and underpays other kinds of workers."

"Violence against women is the cause and consequence of women's inequality."

"The word 'reckoning' suggests that somebody has to be reckoned. What has to be reckoned with? If you're saying that American history has to be looked at and that we have to see the impact of American history on the present, I agree. But then you have to look at inequality today. How much of that is caused by history, and how much of that is caused by personal decision-making?"

"You cannot have this level of inequality and sustain it."

"In reality, while his people starve, Kim Jong Il is living the high life."

"Sociology can teach young people how our society constructs inequality and once we start down that road we can do something about it."

"There are a lot of people, particularly people who are working low-wage jobs, who do not have the luxury of staying home."

"We live in a nation today which has massive levels of income and wealth inequality."

"The United States is a pretty good country for most people. If the United States is a bad country for anybody, then it's a bad country for poor people."

"If you are to address the problem and stop the riots, you have to address the underlying inequality that has historically been pervasive."

"To prove that your monetary policy has led to stark wage disparity, to stark wealth disparity."

"The traditional system favors the people that already have money. That's not fair."

"Growing geopolitical divisions, increasing inequality, the failure of nations to move quickly to tackle the climate crisis."

"There are two standards of justice in this country. We see it every single day. The American people see this every single day."

"The inflation tax hurts the poor and low-middle income especially because they end up with an inflation rate much faster than those who are rich."

"The characteristic feature of social networks is profoundly unequal because in almost all social networks, there is this extraordinary phenomenon of preferential attachment."

"Latin American prospects are exploited in a corrupt system that does not treat them the same as the prospects in the United States, Canada, or Puerto Rico."

"Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities."

"Greed to me is when you want to take something from somebody else so that you have more than them."

"I was a conventional liberal microeconomist, interested in inequality issues to be sure, but many other issues besides. But being black, living here in America, one couldn't really escape being engaged with the debates about discrimination and disparities and racial inequality."

"In America, everybody has access to clean water, but what we're going to show... is that people on the street aren't getting the things that they needed."

"The real question isn't about being kind or unkind to low IQ people; it's about understanding the underlying causes of inequality and addressing them accordingly."

"Hamilton is literally the story of an immigrant coming from extreme poverty and managing to shape the future of an entire country, and yet almost no one who gets to see it live is remotely from that background."

"Inequality exists for both men and women, and it's desirable to address both of them."

"We're building a dystopia where the rich live off robots and the poor serve the rich."

"The same economic system that created so much prosperity...is now creating inequality and climate change."

"By virtually every measure, there's racial inequality in this country and by many measures, it's increasing, not decreasing."

"We're developing a caste system... it's kind of happening already."

"Gross inequality with 44% of the UK's wealth owned by just ten percent of our population."

"I don't believe all inequality is necessarily injustice."

"Racism or racialism is the unequal treatment of a population group purely because of its possession of physical or other characteristics socially deemed undesirable."

"We're all struggling, man, and I believe that we're all in the same water, but we're not in the same boat."

"When you have a people who is used to having power over another people, they don't see a reality where power is something to be shared, or a reality where folks can be equal."

"The rise of AI is going to disrupt the world system; there'll be new haves and have-nots."

"Every single law that has ever been passed in the United States affects some groups differently than others."

"This looks like a move by an outfit called Robinhood which is supposed to be taking from the rich and giving to the poor and doing exactly the opposite."

"If we know that unfairness and inequity has been handed down to us, then we have to be conscious about how we're going to undo that."

"Women's stress is caused by deep and growing inequality, not hormones or biological sensitivity."

"The worst is over, but does that include low-income workers? The most marginalized among us."

"Some animals are more equal than other animals."

"The system, especially for economically disadvantaged kids, is broken."

"Divided countries are easier to rule, and nothing divides us like the perception that some people are getting special treatment in our country."

"However, a collapse in Fiat currencies would also result in massive reductions in inequality as people would become equally poor which would act as an effective reset."

"To develop a capitalist system that grows the pie and limits inequalities is the biggest challenge for leaders."

"For some people, black lives don't matter at all."

"Blizzard fostered a horrifically sexist workplace culture, pay disparity was everywhere and female employees were treated as second-class citizens."

"We cannot for one second act like we have equality anymore when it's gone too far the other way."

"Policymakers should take responsibility to embrace ideas that not only prevent the deepening of inequality but also begin to compensate for the errors of the past."

"The two-tier justice system: them but it is one system for most people and another system for the rich, the powerful, the influence peddlers, etc."

"The problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets: persistent and poisonous inequities and injustice."

"The fact that the Tibers can just sit back in their mansions and watch their own people being mistreated on a daily basis by the Marleyans is pretty freaking grotesque in my opinion."

"We remain in a once in a century public health crisis that's led to the most unequal job and economic crisis in modern history."

"This is the largest amount of global inequality that we've seen since World War II."

"As long as there is no economic challenger strong enough to end this system, capitalism will continue to rob the poor for the benefit of the wealthy."

"Economic inequality leads to serious economic instability."

"We're done letting hedge fund billionaires treat the stock market like their personal playground."