Margaret Heffernan Quotes

Money and corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep.

In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work - now and then for the people, albeit inefficiently and unreliably.

The system seems to most people as rigged, and it is.

Corruption is... the result of a decadent political regime. We are absolutely convinced that this evil is the main cause of social and economic inequality, and also that corruption is to blame for the violence in our country.

Income inequality and government corruption are both unfortunate realities in the United States.

The cancer that demands our urgent attention is corruption and poverty.

Money doesn't just buy a nice car; it also buys better education or healthcare. Increasingly, it can buy impunity from justice, a pliant media, favorable laws, business advantage, and even elections. This, in turn, perpetuates the policies that allow a tiny elite to accumulate ever more wealth at the expense of the majority.

...and for that they were rich,/And robbed the poor; and for that they were strong,/And scourged the weak; and for that they made laws/Which turned the sweat of labor's brow to blood! - /For these their sins the nations cast them out.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

The root cause of poverty is social injustice and the bad government that abets it

Poverty is unnecessary.

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

Everybody keeps saying that India's a poor country. Yes, we have poverty. But I blame the government of India, the political establishment, for their failure to educate and therefore their failure to control the poverty.

Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

The tax collector must love poor people, he's creating so many of them.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

If we become too scared to confront the chief problems of our time, there is no hope of ever solving them.

Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.

People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.

We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course. Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic.