Francis Fukuyama Quotes

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.

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.

Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

Economic growth driven by large-scale infrastructure investments without equitable provision of education will leave hundreds of millions of people behind, exacerbating inequality, disillusion, and instability.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Do what is best for most people, not just a few. Prevent your elites and growing middle class, those who often benefit most from growth and development, from turning into a special interests group that blocks reforms.

You need some inequality to grow... but extreme inequality is not only useless but can be harmful to growth because it reduces mobility and can lead to political capture of our democratic institutions.

Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?

Arresting development, attacking science, and glorifying poverty is not the answer to the vices that attend prosperity.

If we have major geographic areas within our continent that have a tremendous lack of economic opportunity, we found that that is going to produce instability _ economic, political and social.

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 issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

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

…an enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind…

Inequality of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his Constitution of Human Nature that no art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.