William T. Vollmann Quotes

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

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

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

Social inequality kills. It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disease and disease, and cuts short their lives.

We are at great risk in our democracy for failing to understand the great depths of poverty.

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

The rich have all the speech they want; the poor have lockjaw.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

One of the glaring failures of capitalism is the continuing widespread existence of poverty - often extreme poverty. Even in the advanced economies, many millions of people endure terrible economic and social deprivation, despite the incredible wealth all around them.

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

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

We live in a country of grotesque inequalities.

'Munmun' happened because the human world's dizzying inequality - of wealth and of power - had begun to send me over the edge, and I had to write something to try to help myself understand it a little better.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

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.

It's the rich you can terrorize. The poor have nothing to lose.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.