Morgan Freeman Quotes

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

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.

I have never been a believer that nice clothes should only be for people with money.

You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don't like to think of themselves as poor.

Los Angeles cannot permanently exist as two cities—one amazingly prosperous, the other increasingly poorer in substance and in hope.... This city, like the nation, is living with an increasing polarization of incomes. A rising tide no longer lifts all boats.

... popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty.

The level of real income is not what determines whether they are happy or not. It’s their relative place in the pecking order.

Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish…. it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

Our parents’ incomes play a larger role in our personal economic fortunes than is true for other peer countries.

You’re twice as likely to realize the American Dream if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

I didn't come from a council estate like a lot of the lads do.

Look, I'm not saying you can't make it if you grew up from a wealthy situation. I mean, a ton of people have.

As a kid, my dad moved us to the upper town, which was in a higher class of people, and we would see the lower town below. Every day, we could see where we came from and where we were now.

The American dream itself is declining.

Hillary Clinton, income inequality, it's richest damn woman next to the Kennedy family, and you're trying to tell me she cares about income inequality?

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.

The haggardness of poverty is everywhere seen contrasted with the sleekness of wealth, the exhorted labour of some compensating for the idleness of others, wretched hovels by the side of stately colonnades, the rags of indigence blended with the ensigns of opulence; in a word, the most useless profusion in the midst of the most urgent wants.

An inequality of property is the root and foundation of innumerable evils; it tends to derision, and to keep asunder the social feelings that should exist among the people of God. It is a principle originated in hell; it is the root of all evils. It is inequality in riches that is a great curse.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.