William Feather Quotes

Without the rich - without those who accumulated capital - those poor who could exist at all would be very much poorer indeed, scratching a livelihood from marginal lands on which every drought would kill most of the children they would be trying to raise.

China is soon to be probably the most powerful nation in the world, but they only making like $10,000 a year, and that's doing it. They're balling on $10,000 a year, and this is the strongest nation? But it's a billion people. The way it breaks down, if you really look at it, it's still built on the poor, on the backs of hundreds of millions of destitute, impoverished farmers that you'll never see. You just see Shanghai and you see Hong Kong.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

In America, we are just moving the chairs around and spending huge amounts of money rather than having them go in making people's lives better.

The transfer of three shillings and sixpence a day to every labourer would not increase the quantity of meat in the country. There is not at present enough for all to have a decent share. What would then be the consequence?

In recent times no problem has been more puzzling to thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of our affluence.

If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

If you stimulate the economy by means of a tax cut, the people that you tend to be benefiting are the better off.

America is America. It's a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence... I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.

More paper money cannot make a society richer, of course, it is just more printed-paper. Otherwise why is it that there are still poor countries and poor people around?

Making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer.

Hear me people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

What neo-capitalism does so brilliantly is that it's always subdividing and dividing, so that people are never able to be joined in their numbers and strength in a unified way. That is exactly what we have to overcome.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

President Bush announced his new economic plan. The centerpiece was a proposed repeal of the dividend tax on stocks, a boon that could be worth millions of dollars to average Americans. Well, average stock-owning Americans. Technically, Americans who own a significant amount of shares in dividend-dealing companies. Well, rich people, that's what I'm trying to say. They're going to do really well with this.

There are places that are thriving in America that don't need very much help, and then there are places where people feel so discouraged and so left behind, like nobody cares about them. And I want to try to help there.

Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them.

It's always the rich and there's plenty to waste, yet still China has a lot of people living in very spare, poor conditions.