Hank Green Quotes

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.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you're in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you're in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in... you're exposed to people with more.

Rich is not better.

Society is composed of two great classes-those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

We judge of entire nations by the productions of a few mechanical arts, and think we are talking of men, while we are boasting of their estates, their dress, and their palaces. The sense in which we apply the terms, great, and noble, high rank, and high life, show, that we have, on such occasions, transferred the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage; and that excellence itself is, in our esteem, a mere pageant, adorned at a great expense, by the labors of many workmen.

…luxury is the result of wealth, or it makes wealth necessary. It corrupts both rich and poor, the one by possessing, the other by coveting. It sells out the fatherland to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its Citizens by enslaving some of them to others and all of them to opinion.

All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.

Many people have beautiful homes and beautiful things, but other people haven't ever seen them. So why have them?

We always want more. Whether it is better clothes, a bigger house, faster cars, or the latest gadgets, satisfaction in these days of consumerism is difficult to find.

In the operative opinion of the world, he who is already fully provided with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more;while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

I had the notion that, OK, so now we have all of this wealth, we could buy not only one expensive car, we could buy all of them. As soon as you realize that you could buy all of them, then none of them are particularly interesting or satisfying.

In all the world, rich people are very unpopular.

We're leaving the House to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth... or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.

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.

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

It's horrible how money and fame can make you acceptable while, if you're not famous or rich, you're not acceptable.