James Madison Quotes

I'm not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy.

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

…of all the causes of seditions and changes in the Republic, there is none greater than the excessive wealth of a few subjects, and the extreme poverty of the majority.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

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

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

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

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

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

Let Socialists make the laws today and they would break them tomorrow. No sooner do the poor become rich than they harden their hearts to the miseries of the poor. In so far as it proposes to correct the evils of unequal fortune, Socialism aims to repeal the laws of nature.

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

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

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

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.

Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.