Barack Obama Quotes

Legislation has been and is still directed towards the protection of wealth, rather than towards the far more important interests of labor on which everything of value to mankind depends.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

I fundamentally believe that politics is counterintuitive. The left think they're helping working people by providing more rights, but all that actually happens is you create poverty and despair, because jobs go to your competitors who have fewer rights for workers.

In the 'Nike Economy,' there are no standards, no borders and no rules. Clearly, the global economy isn't working for workers in China and Indonesia and Burma any more than it is for workers here in the United States.

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.

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

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

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

The ongoing internationalization of the economy is confronting the labor movement

This is a matter of humiliation to the nation that an employee who suffered an injury through no fault of his own would not be protected. In no other prominent industrial country in the world could such gross injustice occur.

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.

The hard-working Americans, the people who made this country so great, they've been left in the dust.

There are too many people trying to take opportunity from people in the middle class.

If the global economy is unresponsive to people who feel left behind, if inequality continues to grow, then we could end up seeing more and more of these divisions arise throughout advanced economies around the world.

When I was poor and I complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm starting to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.

There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.

In the U.S. when people like me started writing things about inequality, the economic journals had no classification for inequality. I couldn't find where to submit my inequality papers because there was no such topic. There was welfare, there was health issues, there was trade obviously. Finance had hundreds of sub groups.

The class war is over.

In this, of all the countries in the world, possession of inordinate wealth by individuals should be held as a crime against Indian humanity.

The poor have been sent to the front lines of a federal budget deficit reduction war that few other groups were drafted to fight.

Fast food workers are all the governor has power to enact. Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on.

On inequality, I contend that far too much of the nation's wealth and income is gravitating to too few. This undermines the democracy we all cherish and the overall social cohesion necessary to maintain our wonderfully successful society.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

There was a hope then by some people that what we call trickle-down economics would work. That if you made the economy pie bigger, everybody would benefit. Twenty-five years after NAFTA, we know that that is not true. We should have known then that it was not true.