Lauren Oliver Quotes

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

I was in a high school where everybody was a click better off.

A dangerous chasm in the classes is alive and well in the United States of America. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.

For most practical purposes Tarbean had two pieces: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves, and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians, and courtesans.

We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

I think technology is spreading, and I think one's experience of technology is going to relate increasingly to class - not so much to country.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

Money can't buy poverty.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

In 1750, 75 percent of people on the planet worked to support the top 25 percent.