Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

It's not class warfare to talk about fairness.

Governance should be designed as an equalizer. Democrats are more inclined towards working families and those who are struggling for a better life.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.

The difference of the degrees in which the individuals of a great community enjoy the good things of life has been a theme of declaration and discontent in all ages.

We have this kind of revolving door, we don't have a permanent class of millionaires in America like a lot of other countries.

It is a fact that around the world the elites of every country are making money.

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

Democracy really depends not only on not just having a middle class but having wealth distributed relatively evenly across the society so that people buy into the legitimacy of the system

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.

Political power is now widely diffused; and whatever may be the evils of democracy, this good has come of it, that it has forced men to open their eyes to the misery of the masses, and to inquire more zealously as to the possibility of a better distribution of wealth.

How do we make sure that rising tides lift all boats and not just the yachts?

We must ensure the economy really works for all, to address unconscionable wealth and income disparities that allow access to opportunity for some over others.

I try to deal with the poverty gap - to do policies for all of us rather than only for the wealthy.

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?

Income inequity has to be addressed.

In America there are none poor, and none even that can be called peasants. Each citizen has some property, and all citizens have the same rights as the richest individual, or landed proprietor, in the country.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

I am hard-core middle class.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.