Social Inequality Quotes

• 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

  Mean, Government, Political

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• It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Wise, Equality, Men

  Dennis v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1950)

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• What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.

  B. R. Ambedkar

  Rights, Order, Liberty

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• Schools, the institutions traditionally called upon to correct social inequality, are unsuited to the task; without economic opportunity to follow educational opportunity, the myth of equality can never become real. Far more than a hollow promise of future opportunity for their children, parents need jobs, income, and services. And children whose backgrounds have stunted their sense of the future need to be taught by example that they are good for more than they dared dream.

  Kenneth Keniston

  Dream, Jobs, Children

  Kenneth Keniston, Carnegie Council on Children (1977). “All our children: the American family under pressure”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• The great biblical tradition enjoins on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor.  It bids us break the bonds of injustice and oppression which give rise to glaring, and indeed scandalous, social inequalities.

  Pope Francis

  Biblical, Voice, Giving

  "Pope Tells Philippines Leaders To End Corruption, Hear Cries Of The Poor" by Philip Pullella and Manuel Mogato, www.businessinsider.com. January 15, 2015.

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  We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Wisdom, Country, Power

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• General improvements in health/decline in mortality do not affect all classes equally. As mortality rates fall, social inequalities commonly widen.

  Michael Marmot

  Fall, Health, Class

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• 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

  Democracy, Comfort, Groups

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• Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities. Charity separates the rich from the poor; aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich.

  Evita Peron

  Men, Generosity, Doe

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• All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn.

  John Stuart Mill

  Character, Simple, People

  John Stuart Mill (2008). “On Liberty and Utilitarianism”, p.234, Bantam Classics

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• America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it's tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn't solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it's still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment?

  Golda Meir

  Country, Opportunity, Government

  Interview with Oriana Fallaci, Ms. Magazine, April 1973.

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• Essential to the attainment of these national goals is the moral imperative of ensuring social justice and respect for human dignity. The great biblical tradition enjoins on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor. It bids us to break the bonds of injustice and oppression which give rise to glaring, and indeed, scandalous social inequalities. Reforming the social structures which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor first requires a conversion of mind and heart.

  Pope Francis

  Heart, Biblical, Voice

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• The American people have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Good Life, Thinking, People

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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• When the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots.

  Vandana Shiva

  Native American, Issues, Roots

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship.

  Norman Lock

  Animal, Rights, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution.

  Benazir Bhutto

  Technology, California, Valleys

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• consumption can be very harmful to the world. I'm not a big proponent of the idea that consumption makes you morally bad, but there are consequences to our acts, and those consequences are environmental degradation and the huge social inequalities that make our standard of living in the United States possible.

  Judith Levine

  Ideas, Environmental, Degradation

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• Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Powerful, Views, Long

  Patricia Hill Collins (1998). “Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice”, p.16, U of Minnesota Press

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• I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?

  Adolf Hitler

  Country, Hatred, Feelings

  "Hitler's Table Talk". Die Bormann Vermerke: Transcripts of Hitler's conversations (5 July 1941 - 30 November 1944), made under the supervision of Martin Bormann, 1953.

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