Irvine Welsh Quotes

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

The wealth of this land must be immediately redistributed among its 125 million people if America is to be saved as a country.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

It's not class warfare to talk about fairness.

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?

It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true, that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

As a general rule, nobody has money who ought to have it.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

You can't start taking away benefits if people don't have any opportunities.

Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that's a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.

The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

Economic growth doesn't mean anything if it leaves people out.

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.

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

Government has a responsibility to the have-nots.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

The best social programs we've had in this country are those that have united the middle class and the poor.