Pedro Solbes Quotes

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

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.

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

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

I try to deal with the poverty gap - to do policies for all of us rather than only for the wealthy.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.

The greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege and unequal distribution of wealth.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

Poverty is a national issue and needs a federal response. After all, U.S. federal government policies helped produce massive income inequality by lopsided breaks for the super wealthy.

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.

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.

So when the only domestic social policy is tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans, we say, 'Where is faith being put into action here?'

But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

We have now had a long period of very limited participation in the growth of our society…. If you are going to have broad based political support for economic policies, you have to have broad based participation in the benefits of those policies…. This is a change of historic proportions.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

Government has a responsibility to the have-nots.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country -- and by rich people I mean the super-rich -- will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.