Michael Harrington Quotes

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

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

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

I think in the last thirty years, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. It is not something that you can see with rose-colored glasses.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

If no man could become rich in Peru, no man could become poor.

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.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

I think that the poorest of the poor... look up to wealthy and successful Indians with some degree of respect and pride.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there. We have 300 million poor in India.

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.

I don't want there to be this separation between the rich and poor. I may be part of the three percent because I've been fortunate and done well for myself, but I will never forget about the 97 percent. That was me growing up. I was so poor I dreamt about being just 'regular poor,' not 'poor, poor.'

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

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

Republicans look after the rich, and Democrats focus on the needs of the middle class. Neither of them looks after the poor.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.