Joel Sternfeld Quotes

The planet is not yet safe. It suffers from the kind of greed that ignores not only global warming but an even more immediate bomb ready to detonate—the terrible gap on the globe between the rich and the poor, the technologically proficient and the majority left behind, the overfed and the starving, and the arrogance of our only superpower, my country, that sees only as far as the next election or tomorrow's Dow Jones Industrial Index.

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.

We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

The fact is that the rich are getting richer while the poor are being left behind. Women remain under-represented in boardrooms and under-engaged in the global workforce. Environmental change is leaving the poorest countries vulnerable. Voters are becoming more and more politically polarised and partisan.

The reality is that not only were we massively hit in 2008 when the bubble burst, and then we realized how deep the social gap, the economic gap in the world is between the super rich and the poor; also, we realized how impacted the environment has been. So there's been a physical consequence of that.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

I think, unfortunately, we've always lived in a world of massive inequality: inequality between the haves and the have-nots, inequality between men and women that not only exists temporally but geographically as well.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

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

The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America's wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.

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.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t.

There are only two families in the whole world, my old grandmother used to say, The Haves and the Have-Nots.

The poor will never cease out of the land.

The reigning model of economic globalization threatens earth’s life systems, undermines cultural integrity and diversity, and endangers the lives of many who are poor in order that some might consume exorbitantly and a few accumulate vast wealth.

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

What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries?

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

The poor are little folks living on little lands who want what we already have.