Geoff Dyer Quotes

I am fortunate to stay at lots of lovely hotels when I'm on tour, but my favourite hotel group in Britain is Malmaison. I recently stayed at the Malmaison in Manchester, which was pretty amazing. It had a fabulous bar and restaurants, as well as fantastic rooms with mood lighting.

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

When exploring London, you will come across lots of excitement by chance, so try to take everything in rather than just rushing around to all of the major tourist haunts.

On my first trip to New York in the 1980s, the first place I wanted to visit was the Plaza Hotel, home to Kay Thompson's Eloise.

A nation with their freezers full are dancing in their seats, while outside another nation is sleeping in the streets.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes; but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields; but theyare starving in the midst of its abundance: the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden; but they feel as reptiles that infest it.

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.

A pauper in the midst of wealth.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

For a beggar to live at court is not so much as the King to dwell with him in his cottage.

Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve.

He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his chains.

Rich people (in Australia) have swimming pools in their gardens but, at least, they do swim in them.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

I was very sad for many days when I discovered that in the world there were poor people and rich people; and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor did not cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.

Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.

Race is a huge factor when it comes to income and social inequality, and it plays a role in the structural barriers you are talking about. But when you're in the upper echelon of the 1 percent - even though it's certainly a more white demographic overall - there are fewer barriers.

Well, you can do whatever you want, but just don’t call it inequality. Put the word poverty there. Because we have many rich people on our board, and when they see the word poverty that makes them feel good, because [it means] they’re really nice people who care about the poor. When they see the word inequality it makes them upset, because [it means] you want to take money from them.

When you have an economically unequal society, you end up with huge swaths of society that are disposable, basically.

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.

It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.

In America, we have freedom of choice. But some are free to choose between Lamborghini and Rolls Royce while others are free to choose which dumpster they're going to have their meal out of next. Some are free to choose which, you know, homes and farms to foreclosed on, while others choose which bridge they're going to sleep under tonight.