Bella Abzug Quotes

Like it or not, most things in this country are run by white males.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

George W. Bush has helped those who have most, hurt those who have least and ignored everyone in between.

For a long time in the United States, in practice if not in principle, only white, male, Protestants were born free and equal.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

… as long as men, even socialist men, even the best men in the world, make laws these will be to their advantage and to our disadvantage.

It's always going to be a fight for anyone who isn't an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn't have a fight.

It will be hard to convince people that their welfare is safe in the hands of a federal government when they feel themselves the victims of unjust sectional discrimination.

I don't hear women who are less privileged thinking they're entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That's a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon.

Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity.

The point of privilege and the notion of mansplaining is that sometimes I definitely feel like I should shut up. That's it functioning. That's the notion of privilege functioning.

The one thing that never changes in America is that the white straight male is born with a promise. Women are not promised very much, and we embody our disappointment from the beginning.

There are all kinds of ways in which especially white men in this country have been helped by the government.

That is just the reality of being a marginalized person in this country: you have to deal with the psychological impact of your oppressor - whether that's being a woman dealing with men or gay people dealing with straight people or trans people dealing with everybody else.

If you are a young, white, straight man in today's society, you are in trouble.

'Munmun' happened because the human world's dizzying inequality - of wealth and of power - had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

It is always open season on Christian and on white folks because they are the group you can kick and you can get away with it. It is politically correct.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.