Inequality of Wealth Quotes

For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.

Envy is always referred to by its political alias, 'social justice’.

In a well-governed nation poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a badly governed country wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.

I believe welfare makes you lazy and unproductive.

here is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic, and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.'

Arresting development, attacking science, and glorifying poverty is not the answer to the vices that attend prosperity.

Now all of you profiteering "patriots" who have bawled yourself hoarse about "standing back of the President" get into line and support his recommendation for "additional taxes on war profits, incomes and luxuries.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

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.

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

People saw the Depression as a necessary thing - a chance to squeeze out the excesses, get back to Puritan morality. That just made things worse.

To ruin those who possess something is not to come to the aid of those who possess nothing; it is only to render misery general.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

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

We have … a clear mandate from the people, that Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well.

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

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.