William Gibson Quotes

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

We're running out of rich people in this country.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

The difference of the degrees in which the individuals of a great community enjoy the good things of life has been a theme of declaration and discontent in all ages.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

The wall between rich and poor is a wall of glass which all can see.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

Inequality is now determined more about where you live than the class you belong to.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

Rising inequality has changed family dynamics for all socioeconomic groups.

Income inequality is one thing, but a permanent division into the haves and have-nots is an entirely different thing - and much less acceptable.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

In Caribbean there is no middle class: you're either rich or you're poor. And the ladder to success is not really a ladder, it's a chain; once you reach a certain level, you can't go back and you can only keep going forward.

America is a country that would rather talk about race than class.

When I was asked: "Will shame do it?" Meaning: Will welfare people be shamed into getting respectable work? And I said that shame plays the biggest role there is: The biggest shame is that there is so much abundance around but that so many have so little and so few have so much. That's the shame.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

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