Peter Dicken Quotes

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

London is the greatest city in the world, but we're at a crossroads. Ordinary Londoners have been priced out of our city because of the housing crises. We're a city that's growing in population, but the infrastructure can't cope with the growth.

We need strength and success elsewhere in our country - not by pulling London down but by building the rest of the country up.

I live in Loudoun County, and the counties surrounding Washington, D.C., have the highest per-capita income in the country. Not because they create wealth, but because they suck wealth from the rest of the country, and that system needs to be shaken up.

In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

Wealth inequality has increased.

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

The economy is rigged in favor of those at the top.

A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much and so many have so little.

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to Nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colours, thereby fostering racial chaos.

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

Today the cities dominate and drain the villages so that they are crumbling to ruin.

I was there in Washington in the '90s. It was pretty bad then. It's much worse now [in 2015]. And that vicious cycle is you've got again big corporations, executives, Wall Street, very wealthy individuals in both parties who are calling the shots.

If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.

We live in a country where a small number of people have incredible wealth and power. America has more income and wealth inequality than any other major country.

The financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households in the U.S. exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.

Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you've got a $30 trillion (US) world economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries... These inequities can't exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in terms of social breakdown.

They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.

There are places that are thriving in America that don't need very much help, and then there are places where people feel so discouraged and so left behind, like nobody cares about them. And I want to try to help there.

By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.

Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?

It's still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we'd be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We'd be rich and they'd be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They're all full of it. Nothing balances out.