Nick Hanauer Quotes

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

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

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Revolutions break out when opposite parties, the rich and the poor, are equally balanced, and there is little or nothing between them.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

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

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

…of all the causes of seditions and changes in the Republic, there is none greater than the excessive wealth of a few subjects, and the extreme poverty of the majority.

Of the 1 Percent. By the 1 Percent. For the 1 Percent.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Davos is where billionaires tell millionairs what middle class people think.

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

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Government has got to work for all of us and not just for a few billionaires..

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

The men of middling property and poor men can never be safe in a mixed representation with the men of over-grown property.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social, and political system work for the middle class?

Inequality is a good thing. You can’t have a capitalistic system without it. But we have excessive inequality now. Virtually all the benefits are going to a small group of people.

History is made in the class struggle and not in bed.