Noam Chomsky Quotes

The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.

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.

While a few poor countries are catching up with the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals around the globe are huge and likely growing.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.

Welfare for the wealthy simply can no longer be afforded.

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

There's not a lot of wealth throughout all the country shared equally.

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

In my view, there is no justice when the 15 wealthiest people in this country in the last two years, saw their wealth increase by $170 billion. That is more wealth acquired in a two year period than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans.

Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.

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?

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country, and it's got to be addressed. We've got to stop it. It's eroding our politics. It's separating our society into the haves and the have-nots. It's condemning a whole younger set of our population to not be able to enter the middle class. And, it hits hardest in the prairie areas of the United States, our small towns and communities, where the jobs just aren't available and the incomes are low.

What drags down our entire economy is when there's an ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else.

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

There's a wealth gap that is happening, and that is all over the world, you know? The rich are getting richer and holding a higher percentage of money or wealth that's out there.

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.

If the wealthy get wealthier, no one has to become one penny poorer.

In real terms, there is a greater disparity of earnings between the very rich and the very poor.

In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there.

The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, in the city than elsewhere; and, as a rule, the greater are the riches of the rich and the poverty of the poor.

If newspapers were a baseball team, they would be the Mets - without the hope for those folks at the very pinnacle of the financial food chain - who average nearly $24 million a year in income - 'next year.'

Prior to 1940, the affluent and the middle class began to converge, but after 1979, the economic gap between the middle class and affluent widened significantly.

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.