Eric Alterman Quotes

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

The system seems to most people as rigged, and it is.

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here.

I don't hate nobody. I hate certain conditions that are inflicted upon the people - and they're helpless with it.

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

Woe to them, that take away the right of the poor.

Brother! We have, as your friends, fought by your side, and have poured out our blood in your defense, but our arms are now broken. You have grown large. My people have become small, and there are none who take pity on them.

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

I both love inequality and am terrified of it.

Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice.

It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

Large numbers of people are broken from the notion that the system is working for people, that the system is just or humane or peaceful.