Michael Parenti Quotes

We live in a country where a small number of people have incredible wealth and power. America has more income and wealth inequality than any other major country.

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

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

Our family's fortune is growing faster than ever. We're a part of a small number of American families that own most of the country's wealth. But having so much in the hands of so few can't be good for America.

If one man in the country could take all the money, what was the use of passing any bills about it?

In 1750, 75 percent of people on the planet worked to support the top 25 percent.

The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

Surely there is something unlovely, to modern as against medieval minds, about marked inequality of either kind income or power.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

Negro Merchants would gain control of all the lands in the Colony, leaving nothing for all the laboring poor white Men.

Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.

In this world of ours, a world of powerful centers and subjugated outposts, there is no wealth that must not be held in some suspicion.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.

And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.

The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.

Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated - economically or politically - by a powerful few.

Wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor.

The growth of our nation and all its activities are in the hands of a few men.

The thing about a real economy is that it actually is like the game of Monopoly in the sense that when one person has all the money, the game is over. And in a game of Monopoly, of course, that's quite charming, but in a real economy, it's much more problematic.

In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.