Donald Barthelme Quotes

The rich are staying in school, and the poor are being drafted. I can't live with that.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

[On The Hunger Games success]: "It hit on the zeitgeist of the disparity b/w the haves and have nots.

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

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.

The rules of the global economy are rigged against those who have to work to earn a living and in favour of multinational corporations and the ultra-rich.

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.

For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

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.

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

The rich's paradise was created by the poor's hell.

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

O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

If we become tow people-the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear of the other-then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

The class war is over.

There is something patently insane about all the typewriters sleeping with all the beautiful plumbing in the beautiful office buildings -and all the people sleeping in the slums.

This country's going to have a revolution if something doesn't happen the haves and have - nots.

The prince and the peasant will not be equalized by cutting off the prince's head.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.