Economic Privilege Quotes

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.

In today's world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they're cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

The rich don’t need to rely on government … -- they can buy … things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may have once had. They also worry about strong government: one that could use its powers to … take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good.

The woman that comes in, takes the wastebasket away, she's paying 15.3 or whatever it is on payroll tax alone. I mean it is - I never had it so good.

I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.

I don't mind paying higher taxes, because I've done quite well and I'm blessed to live in this country.

I make more money in a week than my father made in a year.

The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.

The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.

I'm definitely working class, and I still believe in those values. I know that losing everything would not be an unfamiliar feeling. Meaning, if you don't have it anymore, you didn't have it to begin with.

I remember in 1990, there were five of us making $3 million a year. When guys passed us, we didn't cry. Why would we cry? You didn't get mad when someone got $6 million. Or $8 million.

We see that the richest property owners ... are precisely those who work the least or who do not work at all.

If you're extremely rich, and you have got children, my theory was, you give them enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.

Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.

Nobody in America lives at the survival level, Most people in the world would love to live the way poor Americans live.

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.

The market system rewards me outlandishly for what I do, but that doesn't mean I'm any more deserving of a good life than a teacher or a doctor or someone who fights in Afghanistan.

Every opponent to socialism should consciously investigate if he, when he lived in hopeless poverty and humiliation, also would be an opponent to socialism

I went to see Chris Rock on Saturday night here in Atlanta, and he made a statement in his comedy. He said, look, when you're the big person, when you're the rich person, poor people can say stuff about you, but it's downright wrong and brutal for rich people to beat up on poor people. He said people who are larger can lampoon people who are skinnier, but not the opposite.

I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.

In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future; but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.

The rich son waits for his father to die, the poor just drink and cry.

Common sense among men of fortune is rare.

I've always been interested in this idea of a privileged life, probably because it's something I hadn't seen much of.

Latin America's economies are organized in a way that concentrates wealth in a few hands but then leaves it untaxed, depriving governments of the resources needed to invest in their citizens' human capital.