Thomas Piketty Quotes

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

I see social mobility and equality of opportunity as really successful Canadian values.

I think this country is genuinely a meritocracy.

I don't think the world works on merit.

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

The vulgar charge that the tendency of democracies is to leveling, meaning to drag all down to the level of the lowest, is singularly untrue; its real tendency being to elevate the depressed to a condition not unworthy of their manhood.

Middle America believes in fair play, an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.

Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

The intelligent quest is for the free society with equality of opportunity. The quest for equality of result is the path to the widest equality of all: despotism.

What am I if not the crystallization of popular demand, the promise of bread, justice and respect.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

Our goal is a classless society.

I hope that liberty and equality and opportunity lie within your heart because the hopes of millions of Americans depend on it.

In America, opportunity and equality are not a zero-sum game

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

The tensions between order and liberty, between opportunity and social justice will always be there, but that’s freedom.