Mickey Rourke Quotes

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Davos is where billionaires tell millionairs what middle class people think.

What is interesting to me about watching a show about the 1% is the world in which the 1% exists, meaning the flaws within the 99% that allow the 1% to exist.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Poor men's words have little weight.

Surely there is something unlovely, to modern as against medieval minds, about marked inequality of either kind income or power.

I am a capitalist—a rich businessman and most of you are not.

The rich don’t need to rely on government … -- they can buy … things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may have once had. They also worry about strong government: one that could use its powers to … take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good.

Capitalism is very undemocratic. Capitalism gives you power according to your wealth while democracy gives you power according to your existence.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

You go to Europe, and they have their very wealthy elites, and then everybody else is, you know, a couple of steps above a peasant, basically.

A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction.

You can only choose between rich and poor. The middle class is gone.

The only way to gain the kinds of often-generational wealth that the 1% has been able to gain is through controlling the populations it relied on to make its wealth.

When conservatives talk about opportunity, they mean opportunities for the rich to get richer, for the powerful to get more powerful.

The ground is the symbol for the poor people; the poor people is gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people. It's gonna be like - there might be some cannibalism out this mother. They might eat the rich.

One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.

The developing world voice can be amplified enormously by support from the wealthy and the privileged, otherwise it's very likely to be marginalized.

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.