Inequality Quotes - Page 20

• 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.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Opportunity, People, Negative

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I have been really heartened by how much coverage there has been about inequality of pay across the board, between the entertainment industry and almost every industry worldwide. And just the problem of young women not getting an education, not being able to have an equal position in the cultures all around the world.

  Bonnie Raitt

  Boards, Culture, World

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• We have a lot of inequality, and I'm not a one-issue candidate, because I don't think this is a one-issue country. So I want to knock down all the barriers that stand in the way of people getting ahead and staying ahead.

  Hillary Clinton

  Country, Thinking, Issues

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• It was shameful that, after Haiti, Colombia was the second most unequal country in Latin America. But we've achieved some things; the inequality is coming down, and coming down fast. The growing economy has provided us with the funds to finance a very progressive social policy that has reduced extreme poverty. We have the lowest inflation rate of all Latin-America countries and the highest growth rate.

  Juan Manuel Santos

  Country, Latin, America

  "'Waging War Is More Popular than Negotiating'". Interview with Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Helene Zuber, www.spiegel.de. May 21, 2014.

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• First of all, [Buckminster Fuller's] identification of the problems that are all that much more pertinent, all that much more pressing in the world today than in his own lifetime from sustainability in terms of the environment to income inequality.

  Jonathon Keats

  Today, Firsts, Buckminster Fuller

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There are, however, those who have called the book [The Kite Runner] divisive and objected to some of the issues raised in the book, namely racism, discrimination, ethnic inequality etc.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Book, Issues, Racism

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• Plato in his dialogue The Phaedo says that whereas sticks and stones are both equal and unequal, (so maybe what that means is that each stick is going to be equal to some other sticks and unequal to some other sticks, so equal to the stick on the left maybe but shorter than the stick on its right) the form of equal is going to be just equal, and it won't partake of inequality at all. And it will be the cause of equality in things that are equal, for example, equal sticks and stones.

  Peter Adamson

  Plato, Mean, Example

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

  Dar Williams

  Children, Slavery, Child Labor

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• The biggest issue for me is whether large numbers of Americans can begin to think that government can actually help make the country a fairer place. And that's partly a matter of policies that achieve results in terms of reducing inequality and raising middle-class and working-class incomes, which have been flat for decades. But it's also symbolic and rhetorical, it's whether Hillary Clinton can - or whoever's president - can persuade Americans that it's happening and that they can begin to trust their elected officials a little bit more and their institutions of government a little bit more.

  George Packer

  Country, Thinking, Class

  Source: www.npr.org

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• We've seen the weakest economic recovery since World War II, and massive levels of inequality and debt.

  Kshama Sawant

  War, Recovery, Debt

  Source: www.socialistalternative.org

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• Only a well-organized movement of young people, educators, workers, parents, religious groups and other concerned citizens will be capable of changing the power relations and vast economic inequalities that have generated what has become a country in which it is almost impossible to recognize the ideals of a real democracy.

  Henry Giroux

  Country, Religious, Real

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• In this particular historical moment, the notion of conjuncture helps us to address theoretically how youth protests are largely related to a historically specific neoliberal project that promotes vast inequalities in income and wealth, creates the student-loan-debt bomb, eliminates much-needed social programs, eviscerates the social wage, and privileges profits and commodities over people.

  Henry Giroux

  People, Historical, Income

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Marginalized youth, workers, artists and others are raising serious questions about the violence of inequality and the social order that legitimates it. They are calling for a redistribution of wealth and power - not within the old system, but in a new one in which democracy becomes more than a slogan or a legitimation for authoritarianism and state violence.

  Henry Giroux

  Artist, Order, Democracy

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Rejecting the notion that democracy and markets are the same, young people are calling for an end to the poverty, grotesque levels of economic inequality, the suppression of dissent and the permanent war state.

  Henry Giroux

  War, Economic Inequality, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, young people all over the world are demonstrating against a variety of issues ranging from economic injustice and massive inequality to drastic cuts in education and public services. These demonstrations have and currently are being met with state-sanctioned violence and an almost pathological refusal to hear their demands.

  Henry Giroux

  Cutting, Issues, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Neoliberal violence produced in part through a massive shift in wealth to the upper 1%, growing inequality, the reign of the financial service industries, the closing down of educational opportunities, and the stripping of social protections from those marginalized by race and class has produced a generation without jobs, an independent life and even the most minimal social benefits.

  Henry Giroux

  Jobs, Educational, Independent

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The national conversation around white entitlement, around institutionalized racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, I think, came about in large part because of the widening and broadening of our understanding of inequality. That conversation was begun by Occupy.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Thinking, White, Racism

  Source: www.salon.com

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• How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

  Adam Hochschild

  Russia, Political, Revolution

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• One feels so despairing on some levels about what's going on in our culture, in regards to things like gender inequality. But there is progress. There is enhanced empathy and respect for others, we are fighting the tide, even though it seems like a tug of war sometimes.

  Uma Thurman

  War, Fighting, Empathy

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• The country that's been most successful at that is Norway. The more typical countries are those in the Middle East where a small group seizes those resources, uses it to buy arms to make sure that they can oppress the remainder, and you get these great inequalities. So Canada is among the better performing of the natural resource economies, but it's still not up to the best performing.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Country, Successful, Natural

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The law cannot save those who deny it but neither can the law serve any who do not use it. The history of injustice and inequality is a history of disuse of the law.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Law, Use, Injustice

  Remarks at Gettysburg on Civil Rights, teachingamericanhistory.org. May 30, 1963.

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• Who's counting? It was, of course, the minority who were counting. It always is. Most of the women I know today would dearly like to use their fingers and toes for some activity more enthralling than counting. They have been counting for so long. But the peculiar problem of the new math is that every time we stop adding, somebody starts subtracting. At the very least (the advanced students will understand this) the rate of increase slows. ... The minority members of any group or profession have two answers: They can keep score or they can lose.

  Ellen Goodman

  Math, Two, Long

  Ellen Goodman (1990). “Making Sense”, Penguin Group USA

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• Nature eschews regular lines; she does not shape her lines by a common model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and picturesque inequality of nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying beauty.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Nature, Flower, Eden

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• Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk; when they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wine, Men, Drunk

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1859). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”, p.64

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• Homemakers work longer and harder than any other class of worker in the United States for less pay, and are the most likely to be replaced by a younger worker.

  Gloria Steinem

  Class, Pay, United States

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