Richard Lamm Quotes

The bigger the gap there is between the rich and the poor, the less stable and successful the society will be

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.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

If you have more rich people and more poor people and fewer people in the middle, what you lose is democracy.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

Income inequality has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.

Uncertainty and fears of social decline and exclusion have reached the middle class in many societies.

The American middle class has always existed to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable: settled values with unsettled ones, social mobility with a sense of permanence.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

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

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.