Tony Judt Quotes

We live in a country of grotesque inequalities.

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.

There is a profound unfairness embedded in the economic system.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

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

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

We should be uncomfortable with the growing gaps in our society, and we cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to these injustices.

Extreme inequality is no temporary blip. It is hard-wired into our economies.

In the operative opinion of the world, he who is already fully provided with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more;while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world.

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

Poverty is unnecessary.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This country is going to implode, or put another way, it's going to get crushed under the weight of poverty. You can't have one percent of the people who own and control more wealth than the other 90 percent of the population.

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

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.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

The world has grown rich and refined, but chiefly by the efforts of those who themselves continue poor and ignorant.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

There’s a mal-distribution in wealth in this country. Entitlements end up going to the rich anyway. Some of them should be attacked. The ones who rip us off, the ones who get bailed out.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.