Ayn Rand Quotes

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

The first world is going to have to account for this sort of horrible poverty in our midst. We have to, first of all, become aware of it. We have to take responsibility for it. And then we have to do something about it for our own freedom, for our own salvation, for our own humanity.

The inequality between the world's individuals is staggering.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.

There are only two families in the whole world, my old grandmother used to say, The Haves and the Have-Nots.

There are but two families in the world … The haves and the have-nots.

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

Elvis Presley's estate is making 30 million a year, and they say that Marley shouldn't be, but he is from a much poorer part of the world, and a lot more people need the money.

There were but two families in the world, Have-much and Have-little.

One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.

The gap between the rich and the poor cannot keep growing without nothing being done about it.

I was at the World Bank and a commission reviewed our work on inequality for the U.S. Congress or somebody, and the head of the commission said to us: "You are spending taxpayer money to study issues like inequality? Which goes directly against capitalism and growth." That was the perception, that it should not be studied.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much and so many have so little.

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.

The world isn't set up equally, and the first billion people using Facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined.

In an era of global abundance, our world has the resources to reduce dramatically the massive divides that persist between rich and poor, if only those resources can be unleashed in the service of all peoples.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.