Inequality Quotes - Page 8

• Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.

  John Shelby Spong

  Gay, Issues, People

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• Rural communities in Africa, South Asia and Latin America are where the majority of hungry people are and the inequality that exists between women and men in these communities is holding back progress. These women have a very tough time, so much is expected of them.

  Dionne Warwick

  Latin, Men, America

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• Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Dream, Moving, Ideas

  "Fareed Zakaria: 'The American Dream Is Better In Europe'" by Noel Sheppard, www.newsbusters.org. November 6, 2011.

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• Building capacity dissolves differences. It irons out inequalities.

  Abdul Kalam

  Iron, Differences, Building

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• If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

  Jane Austen

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  Jane Austen (2013). “Mansfield Park”, p.172, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wealth, Superfluous

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, p.233, Henry David Thoreau

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• Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Mean, People

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• Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Men, Land, Decay

  1770 The Deserted Village, l.51-6.

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• So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Excess, Wealth

  William Shakespeare (1833). “The plays and poems of William Shakspeare”, p.795

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• No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.

  Henry George

  Swimming, Thinking, Two

  Henry George, Kenneth C. Wenzer (1999). “Our Land and Land Policy”, MSU Press

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• A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property.

  Harold Laski

  Small Numbers, Government, Political

  Harold J. Laski (2014). “A Grammar of Politics (Works of Harold J. Laski)”, p.157, Routledge

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• Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process we have created [a] privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of the income inequality.

  Alan Greenspan

  America, Labor Force, Competition

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• All men, among themselves, are by nature equal. The inequality we now discern hath its spring from the civil law.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Spring, Men, Law

  Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Gert (1972). “Man and Citizen: De Homine and De Cive”, p.114, Hackett Publishing

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• The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War ii for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slave like inequalities.

  Theodore Hesburgh

  War, Animal, America

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• There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face: They're demographics, education, debt and inequality. They're powerful enough to cut growth in half.

  Robert J. Gordon

  Powerful, Educational, Cutting

  "The Death of Innovation, the End of Growth". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2013.

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• The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own

  Amartya Sen

  Education, Ignorance, Opportunity

  Jean Drèze, Amartya Sen, World Institute for Development Economics Research (1997). “Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives”, p.5, Oxford University Press

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• Whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its members equal and alike, the personal pride of individuals will always seek to rise above the line, and to form somewhere an inequality to their own advantage.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Pride, Community, Lines

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2003). “Democracy in America”, p.551, Regnery Publishing

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• Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

  William Barclay

  Endurance, Bears, Glory

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• Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

  William Dean Howells

  Heart, Equality, Liberty

  William Dean Howells (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated)”, p.6151, Delphi Classics

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• While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.

  Andrew Carnegie

  Science, Race, Hands

  1889 'The Gospel of Wealth', in the North American Review, Jun.

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• A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

  G. H. Hardy

  Life, Science, Distribution Of Wealth

  A Mathematician's Apology ch. 21 (1940)

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• The argument advanced by the supporters of the theory of hereditary transmission does not furnish a satisfactory explanation of the cause of the inequalities and diversities of the universe.

  Swami Abhedananda

  Science, Diversity, Doe

  Swami Abhedananda (2005). “Vedanta Philosophy”, p.34, 1st World Publishing

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• The breaking up of the terrestrial globe, this it is we witness. It doubtless began a long time ago, and the brevity of human life enables us to contemplate it without dismay. It is not only in the great mountain ranges that the traces of this process are found. Great segments of the earth's crust have sunk hundreds, in some cases, even thousands, of feet deep, and not the slightest inequality of the surface remains to indicate the fracture; the different nature of the rocks and the discoveries made in mining alone reveal its presence. Time has levelled all.

  Eduard Suess

  Life, Science, Mountain Ranges

  Eduard Suess (1904). “The Face of the Earth: (Das Antlitz Der Erde)”

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• In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered.

  Laurance Labadie

  Mean, Opportunity, Income

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• When money, instead of man, is at the center of the system, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced to simple instruments of a social and economic system, which is characterized, better yet dominated, by profound inequalities. So we discard whatever is not useful to this logic; it is this attitude that discards children and older people, and is now affecting the young.

  Pope Francis

  Attitude, Children, Simple

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