William Berkeley Quotes

Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to how too many in the 1 percent get to play by their own rules while exploiting the 99 percent.

We oppose monopoly, the tendency of which is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

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

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

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.

God, how patient are Thy poor! These corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion, and then exacting from the contributors-to whom a little means so much-a double share to guard the treasure!

So long as millions of human beings in every country has to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the so called “equality before the law” remains a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right over one's own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to starve.

I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

How unfair the fate which ordains that those who have the least should be always adding to the treasury of the wealthy.

Property in man, always morally unjust, has become nationally dangerous.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

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

Every government that exists -- or ever existed, or ever will exist -- is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves". Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers

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.

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the nation's masters.

One morning people can wake up and realize there is nothing left to share, that before state property is privatized, all the cream has been skimmed off, and what's left will just be bones.

The strongest bulwark of the capitalistic system is the ignorance of its victims.

Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street... Over 100,000 shopgirls are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them.