Bell Hooks Quotes

I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

History shows that when you have continuing income inequality it is an invitation to class conflict.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

In America, the 1 percent and the 10 percent are doing just fine, but the people who are bearing the brunt of this economy are the ones who suffer.

Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes - one rich, one poor - both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?

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.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

I am not biased against the rich because they are rich, but the most lively people are those without money who would like to have some

The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics.

There are too many people trying to take opportunity from people in the middle class.

I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

This is not class warfare. It’s math.

You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.