Idris Elba Quotes

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn't really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

'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?

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

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

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

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

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

There are only two families in the whole world, my old grandmother used to say, The Haves and the Have-Nots.

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

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts to “raise” the poor.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

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

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

The saddest part is that the public officials, both State and Federal, are in league with the capitalists in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

The "have nots" outnumber the "haves." No wonder the ruling class of every country grows more and more alarmed.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

Poor men's words have little weight.