Woody Guthrie Quotes

In America, we have freedom of choice. But some are free to choose between Lamborghini and Rolls Royce while others are free to choose which dumpster they're going to have their meal out of next. Some are free to choose which, you know, homes and farms to foreclosed on, while others choose which bridge they're going to sleep under tonight.

A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much and so many have so little.

Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

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.

... 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.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

Income inequality is the central problem all the way across the world.

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

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

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

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.

We live in a world where there is so much wealth. There shouldn't be a homeless person. That's crazy.

But avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property, passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence. Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

A poore mans Cow dies a rich mans child.

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live...They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.

Socially, I never belonged to any class, rich or poor. To the rich I was poor, and to the poor I was poor pretending to be like the rich.

There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.

I was very sad for many days when I discovered that in the world there were poor people and rich people; and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor did not cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

The inequality between the world's individuals is staggering.

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?