Social Contrast Quotes

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.

Everything must be in contrast at an affair like this. You know, to show anything off properly you must have the contrast. Now, I am here tonight representing poverty. We have enough wealth right here at this table, right here at the speaker's table alone---their conscience should hurt them, which I doubt if it does---so that we could liquidate our national debt. Every rich man reaches a time in his career when he comes to a turning point and starts to give it away.

More people have smart phones than clean water

To live like a poor man is only fun when you are rich.

I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around.

Fans, when they see me, they're like, 'Rah, he's a real funny person,' but everyone who grew up with me is like, 'Rah, that's Fat Tyrone.'

I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.

It wasn't as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks.

Chicago is complicated and complex and very violent but also very rich with history and tradition and art and culture - it's all these things.

My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave.

Have you ever stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai? I'd warmly recommend it. It's super luxurious, and right next door, there's a classic slum. So you can do a quick slum tour and get back to your sanctuary without any inconvenience but with some excellent snaps.

Uptown living, you've got to call 911. Where I am, I am 911.

Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.

I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people.

The extremes of opulence and of want are more remarkable, and more constantly obvious, in [Great Britain] than in any other place that I ever saw.

It's easy to look at South Central and say, 'That's a bad place,' and it's easy to look at Beverly Hills and say, 'It will be a cakewalk,' but it just exposed me to a different set of problems. Both sides relate to each other more than they think.

Outwardly, it might seem that I like to go out a lot, but I like quiet days at home more.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

I was in Mexico City. It's a very pleasant city in many ways. It's vibrant, lively, pretty exciting society, but also depressing in other ways, and sometimes almost hopeless, you know. So it's a combination of vibrancy and, I wouldn't say despair, but hopelessness, you know. Doesn't have to be, but it is. I mean, there is almost no economy.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

We Batchelors laugh and shew our teeth, but you married men laugh till your hearts ake.

Gays are the molecular opposites of blacks.

When I'm away from a red carpet, I'm a big introvert, I'm very quiet, and I like to sit in silence at home with my cat, Nino, who is my whole world, or most of it.