Jaron Lanier Quotes

What's dangerous is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals.

It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few ...

Great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security. In the last analysis such accumulations amount to the perpetuation of great and undesirable concentration of control in a relatively few individuals over the employment and welfare of many, many others.

I think that both Bernie [Sanders] and Hillary [Hillary] have highlighted how much, over the last few decades, we have seen the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Only 18 percent of the income of America’s richest families come from work—hard or otherwise. In America, most wealth does not come from hard work, It comes from wealth.

…national wealth, especially when carefully accumulated in the hands of a few individuals, is dangerous in the extreme to human liberty.

…empire follows the balance of property, whether lodged in one, a few, or many hands.

Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

Since 2009, 95 percent of all gains in the economy went to the top 1 percent. That didn’t leave very much for the rest of us.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

The more we allow Republicans to concentrate the lion's share of wealth in the hands of a few, the more power these wealthy few will have. And they will use this power to continue rewriting the rules of both our economy and our political system in their favor.

Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.

Four hundred obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks - most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008 - now have more cash, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.

The annual 'Forbes' Billionaires List speaks volumes about the movement and concentration of wealth across industries and geographies.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few threatens the ability of ordinary people to raise their voices and have a say over how our societies are run.

Our economic system has enabled companies and individuals to use their power and influence to capture and retain an ever-increasing share of the benefits of economic growth while the benefits for the poorest in society have shrunk.

Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

In India, the concentration of wealth is in a few hands.

Wealth is used to entrench inequality, not to trickle down and solve it.

I think it's been unfortunate, but it's happened, that since the Great Recession, the gains have all gone to the top. And we need to reverse that.

The massive upward distribution of wealth engineered by our political class over the last few decades has solidified the plutocratic control of the rule-making machinery in Washington and state capitals.