Robert D. Kaplan Quotes

The middle class serves as a bridge between the haves and the have-nots. If it goes, so goes political stability.

The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.

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.

In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

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.

I know people socially who live in countries where the wealth gap is more extreme than it is in America, and they live with full-time security. They live with the threat of getting kidnapped, or they live with the threat of people invading their homes.

If the nation is rich but people are poor, the country cannot be strong, and society will be unstable.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

Today in Ukraine, many people struggle to survive, older ones often see the breakdown of the Soviet system as a loss of stability and security for average people, and therefore a certain hostility to quickly acquired wealth is from their point of view quite understandable at the first look.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

In bad times, the rich usually get richer.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

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

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

There is a profound unfairness embedded in the economic system.

In the United States you have socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

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