Winnie Byanyima Quotes

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

Inherited wealth, that is not what America is based upon.

The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power, the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority.

The financial rewards of economic change have accrued disproportionately to the most talented and well-educated members of society.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.

It's the people who work hard and earn big that keep the machine tipping for everybody else. If everybody else was equal down the bottom rung of a ladder, nobody would be on the ladder at all because it would break and everybody would fall off backwards. So you need people at the top to help pull those people up from the bottom. You can't take that and swing to the right. You can't have everybody living in the same ordinary $60,000 house because you may as well live in Russia, Bulgaria or some other Eastern block Communist nation.

For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few. Here are the choices most of us face in such a system: Get bitter or get busy.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.

Aspiration, it seems, is in danger of becoming the preserve of the wealthy.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.

The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent.

Let some people get rich first.

Does anybody think Steve Jobs should not be in the 1 percent? He made life better for the 99 percent of the rest of us. You want to create opportunities for people with their unique gifts.

I'm a capitalist. I'm not going to feel sympathetic to people leading a life they don't have to lead who, with effort, could maybe break out of it.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist.

You can't very well live in a castle while your kin is on the poor side of town and barely have enough food. Some want you to get to the top and rely on you making it for them, too.

Our democracy may have an aristocracy of talent, as Jefferson said – which is fine – but we don’t want everyone else to be left out. Something like that seems to be happening, though.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

People say law but they mean wealth.