Class Disparity Quotes

No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce.

While young men stand ready to pay with their lives for the honor and interest of the American people, the son of wealthy Mr. [Henry] Ford sits at home in ignoble safety.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

What's fascinating to me is that in rich-kid schools, it's better to be gay. No one is discriminated against because they're gay in a rich-kid school. But in poor-kid schools, it's often not the same. So being gay is a class issue now.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

Very few of the rich are in the army except as officers. Our mission is to disenthrall just such men, to open up before them a brighter future for themselves and their children. Labor must be dignified in the south, and all must have an equal chance.

If we become tow people-the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear of the other-then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

The working class’s share in the national product is constantly diminishing – there is not a shade of doubt about that. The working class is becoming poorer not only relatively, but absolutely too; its income, far from increasing in the same progression as those of other classes in society, is falling; the real wages of the modern proletarian (the quantity of consumer goods falling to his share) are less than the worker’s pay was five hundred years ago

HAMLET [...] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end. CLAUDIUS Alas, alas. HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

[On The Hunger Games success]: "It hit on the zeitgeist of the disparity b/w the haves and have nots.

The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve.

Justice waits upon the great, Interest holds the scale, and Riches turns the balance.

There are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.

The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.

My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.

Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.

So in a strange way, even though Trump is a billionaire, what he's been saying is, "Everything's rigged, it's all corrupt and I'm not corrupt because I'm my own billionaire." Both [Donald] Trump and Bernie Sanders made a lot of hay by making that argument.

It is outrageous and a great inequality that those who already enjoy the greatest advantages from society and who therefore have the greatest interest in its maintenance should also be relieved of taxation while it is drawn instead from the more useful section of the nation …. The more well-established members can, through a relatively smaller portion of their income, support the state far more substantially than can the common man from his … dearly earned wage.

Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.