Omar Bongo Quotes

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country.

Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.

I do not believe in widening the income gap between rich and poor, and my life's work in the inner city of Detroit demonstrates that far more than any sound bite.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It's almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

It's easy to sit in relative luxury and peace and pontificate on the subject of the Third World debts.

The developing world is poor. It needs capital.

We see a small number of countries getting rich at the cost of impoverishment of a large number of other countries.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

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.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan, or Jamaica. But really, there's enough to share, when you check it. It's not that complicated, really. It's probably less thinking and more feeling that's required.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

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.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

I don't consider the first-world concerns any less important than the third-world ones.

Money can't buy poverty.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.

The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.

If a few companies were less greedy, the people at the bottom woud have a lot more.