James Baldwin Quotes

Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery.

Poverty is slavery.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

The more money you take away from families is the less power that family has. And that's a basic power.

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists … poverty is slavery!

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

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.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

Property in man, always morally unjust, has become nationally dangerous.

Money can't buy poverty.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

It's true across the U.K. that those who had least to do with causing the economic crisis are carrying the heaviest burden. That's unacceptable.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Inequality is on the rise.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

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

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

Taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family's budget … Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output -- and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?

Poverty makes slaves of free men.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

Why should there be such abject poverty?

... an apathetic indifferent meat in a sandwich that has an ever thinning slice of maniacal Plutocratic Gluttony on top and an ever thickening slice of rotten vermin rottening at the bottom.

That system, unequal as it is indefensible, is the mightiest engine of oppression imposed upon an honest yeomanry since the feudal ages. This system places a high premium on wealth and a severe penalty on poverty.