Nick Hanauer Quotes

Let some people get rich first.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

We're running out of rich people in this country.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Maybe it’s that silver spoon in his [Mitt Romney’s] mouth that keeps him from seeing why the middle class doesn’t pull itself up by its bootstraps, like he did when Daddy loaned him his first million dollars.

President Reagan told us from the beginning that he believed in a kind of Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest ... [that] we should settle for taking care of the strong, and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.

I don't think that the rich should be attacked. There's nothing wrong in being rich.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

In all the world, rich people are very unpopular.

Prosperity isn't something that squirts out of rich people.

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

Our family's fortune is growing faster than ever. We're a part of a small number of American families that own most of the country's wealth. But having so much in the hands of so few can't be good for America.

People getting rich in a free society in general - with some scammy exceptions, which are rare - makes everyone else richer, too.

Poor people have more fun than rich people, they say; and I notice it's the rich people who keep saying it.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Those who have the most wealth and the most property, their children have the first, the best, and the most.

Cory Booker became a millionaire because this is how the economy works for people of his class: Rich people give other rich people money to do nothing, simply because they 'deserve' it.

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

What the 'supposed 99 percent' don't realize is that they are better off if there are more fat cats, not less.

We have concentrated wealth and capital to such a degree that the vast majority of us don't have the discretionary dollars to make our economy go and grow.

Many times, people attack the well-to-do people. They see an opportunity.