Calvin Trillin Quotes

In America, the 1 percent and the 10 percent are doing just fine, but the people who are bearing the brunt of this economy are the ones who suffer.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.

Mitt Romney said he's not concerned about the very poor. What he means is people making less than a million.

I was very sad for many days when I discovered that in the world there were poor people and rich people; and the strange thing is that the existence of the poor did not cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know.

If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

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

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.

The Obama economy is great for rich people. It's terrible for everybody else.

The world belongs to the wealthy, and nowhere is this injustice more apparent than in the workplace.

In my view, there is no justice when the 15 wealthiest people in this country in the last two years, saw their wealth increase by $170 billion. That is more wealth acquired in a two year period than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans.

There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get - children. In the meantime, In between time...