Jesse Jackson Quotes

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

Bolivia is not yet a country of equals.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

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

The same way I'm not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I'm also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.

We should be uncomfortable with the growing gaps in our society, and we cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to these injustices.

There are positive steps being taken to tackle issues that people from all walks of life, races, ethnicities, and political persuasions agree have been devastating to communities of color.

We need radical, transformative solutions to address the inequality that is blighting millions of people's lives.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

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.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

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.

To understand the Left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The Left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil as humanity has generally understood the term.

The MLK Shabbat Suppers focused on the theme of educational inequity, which Dr. King considered inextricably linked to the struggle for equality and justice.