Walter R. Johnson Quotes

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.

The saddest part is that the public officials, both State and Federal, are in league with the capitalists in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The poor developed an envy and an extreme jealousy, born of the realization that they are as worthy, or even more worthy than the wealthy, and are nonetheless afflicted with poverty, hunger, misery, and contempt.

I come from the poor people, and I have been here working my whole stinkin' career for people who don't have a chance, and I really resent anybody that says I'm doing it for the rich. Give me a break.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger.

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.

That system, unequal as it is indefensible, is the mightiest engine of oppression imposed upon an honest yeomanry since the feudal ages. This system places a high premium on wealth and a severe penalty on poverty.

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it, it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, revolution.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

The rich have all the speech they want; the poor have lockjaw.

Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks, And the rich folks hate the poor folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks, It's American as apple pie.

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

An elite has prospered with our kinds of institutions, but the same cannot be said of the masses.