Johan Rockstrom Quotes

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

It is not acceptable that European Union countries are divided into those who give and those who take.

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

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.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality.

There is here, as in all countries, advantages and disadvantages.

Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.

Research suggests that large divisions of income and wealth weaken demand and generate economic imbalances that create instability and undermine growth.

If the nation is rich but people are poor, the country cannot be strong, and society will be unstable.

It's not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter.

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

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

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

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right.

I was a camp counselor for kids whose moms were on welfare, unfortunately, and right across the camp was the best, most pristine and preppy camp in the universe.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of people's lives.

India has political freedom but it does not have economic freedom.

Income inequality is not a bad thing. Income inequality is a good thing.

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor