Tavis Smiley Quotes

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

One of the glaring failures of capitalism is the continuing widespread existence of poverty - often extreme poverty. Even in the advanced economies, many millions of people endure terrible economic and social deprivation, despite the incredible wealth all around them.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know.

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

I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.

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.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

All down history, nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining one-tenth, been paid with the husks, and bidden to thank God they had the husks.

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

... the wrong and evils of the money-piling tendency of our country ... giving all power to the rich and bringing in pauperism.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

…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.

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.

America has seen enough of a handful of people growing rich at the cost of our nation descending into economic crisis.

The rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.

By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.

I think inequality has gone past the point where it's helping us all get rich, and it's really becoming a serious threat.

If all we've got is the dirt poor and the filthy rich, the dirt poor would eat the filthy rich.