MJ Hegar Quotes

We ought to look at Social Security. We ought to ask ourselves the question, is there inherently something wrong with Social Security that a man like me is eligible for Social Security? There's something wrong with the system.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

I'm aware that not all kids can pick up and fly to Panama. I'm very lucky.

I'm ashamed to say that I'm from a very privileged background.

Better educated than wealthy

The wealthy and the connected have had a President for the last seven years. It’s about time that the rest of us had a President also.

Poor people don’t make campaign contributions.

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

The Indian elite send their children to expensive private schools, bypassing the public school system. They have their own infrastructure for water, with sumps to store it, pumps to lift it, and fancy filters to de-risk from erratic, polluted government water. Most access private healthcare to bridge the health services deficit.

Almost one-fourth of our children are living in poverty. No other western industrialized nation has anything close to that figure. This is not an act of God. There is no divine intervention that says children in America have to live in poverty more than children in Italy, or Denmark, or Great Britain, or Canada, or other western industrialized nations. It a result of flawed policy. It is a result of policy that panders to those who make campaign contributions rather than to needs

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer.

The poor developed an envy and an extreme jealousy, born of the realization that they are as worthy, or even more worthy than the wealthy, and are nonetheless afflicted with poverty, hunger, misery, and contempt.

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

The inequality that exists today, … derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity …

The one think I hate about rich people, is that they really think that they work harder than poor people.

I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

It wasn't until sixth grade, at P.S. 168, when my teacher took us on a field trip to her house that I realized we were poor. I have no idea what my teacher's intentions were - whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.

Israel's middle class is paying for those below it, and that's fine, but also for those who are above it, and that's very wrong.

At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.

There are a lot of women who do a similar job to me who are paid a hell of a lot more... who are a lot posher than me.

The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care... They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.

I don't subscribe to the view that people who are better off don't want to live in a more equal society.

I didn't have the clothes that a kid with a famous, rich dad would have. I didn't have the house. I didn't have the mannerisms. I didn't have the sense of entitlement. And I don't mean that in a bad way: I just - we didn't have the stuff.