Walter Lippmann Quotes

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease - a dis-ease or an unease - but I don't think they know what causes it.

The US government is usually on the wrong side against the poor and downtrodden, because the wrong side is the right side, given the class interests upon which the [US] policy is fixed.

[The Democrats] will say that the Reagan administrtion has given benefits to the rich at the expense of the poor - a term that they define broadly to include middle-income people, women, minorities, the aged, the young, farmers, steelworkers, and others.

I think the media and the candidates have got to talk about why the middle class is in decline and why we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality.

I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

There is no peace in poverty

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.

You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

This is a guy [Steven Lerner] who believes, for example, that Reaganomics or trickle-down economics means, "The rich got rich by stealing from the poor," or stealing from the middle class and making them poor via debt. He has worked with unions in Europe.

In every society where property exists there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor. Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected; they will either be made by the member to plunder the few who are rich, or by the influence to fleece the many who are poor.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.

The first thing that you need to deal with is the issue of equity and poverty.

People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is very dangerous for all of us. I think it's a healthy sign that there are demonstrators in the streets. They are raising the question of 'is the rich world giving back enough?'

One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.

The general idea of the rich helping the poor, I think, is important. That your sense of justice says, why should rich kids - who barely get these diseases and almost never die of them - why should they get the vaccines, when poor kids, who actually do die from these diseases, don't get those things? It's an unbelievable inequity that there isn't that access.

If one class of society is obliged, in order to live, to take any price for its services, while another can abstain from such action thanks to resources at its disposal which, however, are not necessarily due to any social superiority, the second has an unjust advantage over the first at law. In other words, there cannot be rich and poor a birth without there being unjust contracts.

Poverty" Pitt exclaimed "is no disgrace but it is damned annoying." In the contemporary United States it is not annoying but it is a disgrace.