Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 - to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.

We need to have an economy that works for everybody, not just people on the top.

There can be no rule of God in the present state of iniquitous inequalities in which a few roll in riches and the masses do not get enough to eat.

Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.

We have no right to luxuries while the poor want bread.

I believe in an America in which the fruits of productivity and prosperity are shared by all, by workers as well as owners, by those at the bottom as well as those at the top; an America in which the sacrifices required by national security are shared by all, by profiteers in the back offices as well as volunteers on the front lines.

Such security is equal liberty. But it is not necessarily equality in the use of the earth.

Everybody can't have the life of a normal, average American person in India - they can't. So, it's about egalitarianism. It's about sharing things more equally. It's about access to natural resources.

Government has got to work for all of us and not just for a few billionaires..

When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example of the poor to plunder the rich of his property, for the rights of the one are as much property to him as wealth is property to the other and the little all is as dear as the much. It is only by setting out on just principles that men are trained to be just to each other; and it will always be found, that when the rich protect the rights of the poor, the poor will protect the property of the rich. But the guarantee, to be effectual, must be parliamentarily reciprocal.

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

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

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

In a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everybody should prosper.

Of course we want prosperity, but we wish prosperity in such a way … so that everybody will get his share, and that it will not be confined to a few who monopolize the means of production or the means of transportation, and thus prevent that equality of distribution that we all like to see.

No man should be made poor so another man can be made rich.

How do we make sure that rising tides lift all boats and not just the yachts?

I'm not against wealth; I just think everybody should have it, same as health.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

If the goal is truly about equality, it has to be about a goal of saying everybody should end up in the same place.  And since we didn’t start in the same place.  Some folks might need more equitable distribution. 

We have learned to turn out lots of goods and services, but we haven't learned as well how to have everybody share in the bounty. The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.

If nobody has too much, everybody will have enough.

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds - where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough - a modest living- and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.

I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else. ... Nature produces enough for our wants from day to day, and if only every-body took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world. But so long as we have got this inequality, so long we are thieving.