G. H. Hardy Quotes

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.

The greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege and unequal distribution of wealth.

Wealth inequality has increased.

The share of wealth held by the minority is much greater than the share held by the majority. We have to draw our own conclusions from that and it has to change.

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.

Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.

We live in a world in which we're seeing an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

I feel that India lacks a level of philanthropy that is proportional to the wealth that is here, particularly among the top 5,000 industrialists and entrepreneurs.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.

Welfare for the wealthy simply can no longer be afforded.

Not only have [rich] people like me not been asked to sacrifice, but they have had money [tax cuts] thrown at them.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country -- and by rich people I mean the super-rich -- will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Unequal wealth distribution is a risk factor for inequality that must be attacked by policies.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

There are many communities in the United States where the average family income is pitifully low. It is in those communities that we find the poorest educational facilities and the worst conditions of health. Why? It is not because they are satisfied to live as they do. It is because those communities have the lowest per capital wealth and income; therefore the lowest ability to pay taxes; and therefore inadequate functioning of local government.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return