Philip Agee Quotes

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

Poverty is unnecessary.

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.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

It's not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

…In certain parts of Latin America, the seizure of the vast majority of the wealth by an oligarchy of owners bereft of social consciousness, the practical absence or the shortcomings of a rule of law, military dictators making a mockery of elementary human rights, the corruption of certain powerful officials, the savage practices of some foreign capital interests constitute factors which nourish a passion for revolt among those who thus consider themselves the powerless victims of a new colonialism in the technological, financial, monetary, or economic order.

Global poverty is a powder keg ignitable by our own indifference.

All down history, nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining one-tenth, been paid with the husks, and bidden to thank God they had the husks.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term ...to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.