Winnie Byanyima Quotes

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

Poverty is the parent of revolution.

A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.

Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.

We know that social exclusion is closely tied to the new economic world order, globalized, with free and open markets, which isn't bringing prosperity or social justice to all.

To deal with radicalism and extremism, we need to deal with economic inequality. This is what I learned from my experience in Solo and then in Jakarta.

Deep persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation’s promise …. All of us are diminished when any are hopeless.

The real threat to the democracy is the half a nation in poverty.

The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

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

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

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solution to large collective problems, because those problems [to the have’s] no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy/

The poor are little folks living on little lands who want what we already have.

It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.

While we have created prosperity for many, too many are being left behind.

Poverty is a result of lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity is about being without power, without being in a position to make choices.

Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?

Poverty is unnecessary.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums.

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

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.