Thornton Wilder Quotes

Sometimes I make more money in a weekend than my grandpa made in a year.

If the global economy is unresponsive to people who feel left behind, if inequality continues to grow, then we could end up seeing more and more of these divisions arise throughout advanced economies around the world.

In a system of capitalism, as people's wealth rises, the financial incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls, until it becomes zero. We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

We're the richest economy in the history of the world. For the majority of Americans not to get the benefits of this extraordinarily prosperous economy, there's something fundamentally wrong.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

Until these college students came into town, we were all very poor and didn't have money to do anything.

... 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.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.

We learned many years ago that the rich may have money, but the poor have time.

Rising inequality has changed family dynamics for all socioeconomic groups.

'Redistributing the wealth' - that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

Income inequality has made having kids, much like getting a quality college education, a rich person's privilege.

America has become the most unequal society among advanced countries, and rich people are now free to spend as much money on political campaigns as they wish.

The ground is the symbol for the poor people; the poor people is gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people. It's gonna be like - there might be some cannibalism out this mother. They might eat the rich.

Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.

There are rich people, and there are those who have money. They are not the same people.

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth.

It is staggering that in the 21st century, half of the world's population - that's three and a half billion people - own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus.

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

While a few poor countries are catching up with the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals around the globe are huge and likely growing.

The contrast of the world that we live in and the world that is here in Aspen and the world inhabited by women who have no resources, little or no, very few resources - huge disparity.

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country, and it's got to be addressed. We've got to stop it. It's eroding our politics. It's separating our society into the haves and the have-nots. It's condemning a whole younger set of our population to not be able to enter the middle class. And, it hits hardest in the prairie areas of the United States, our small towns and communities, where the jobs just aren't available and the incomes are low.

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not.

If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot.