Social Inequality Quotes

In America, we happen to be living in a third world country from the point of view of economic and social development. I came back from New York yesterday and I took the fastest train in the country, the Acela. My wife and I took the New York-Boston train sixty years ago - it wasn't called the Acela then - and I think it's improved by about fifteen minutes since then. Any other country in the world would be about half the time. In fact when it's riding along the Connecticut turnpike it's barely keeping up with traffic, which is just scandalous.

There are certain restrictive parts of a woman’s constitution that that were given her by nature and which forbid us from applying the same standard of expectation to women as to men.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community, the tendency of people’s suffrage will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in a few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in greater degree considered only as a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.

Four million surplus women. Four million sexually unsatisfied women, artificially creating a host of problems in order to excite or appease their senses. Not being able to embrace one man, they embrace humanity.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

Labor in white skin cannot be free so long as labor in a black skin is branded.

The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portuguese. the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.

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.

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

The few who understand the system [of banking with capitalism] will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests

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

One murder made a villain, Millions a hero. Princes were privileged To kill, and numbers sanctified the crime..

At what point do the oppressed become the oppressors?

I am not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I am one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, and one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism... You and I have never seen democracy; all we've seen is hypocracy... If you go to jail, so what? If you're black, you were born in jail. If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.

Intellectuals have a tendency to see poverty as a great moral problem to which they have a solution. The human race began in poverty, so there’s no mysterious explanation as to why some people are poor. The question is why have some people gotten prosperous, and in particular, why have some gotten prosperous to a greater degree than others. But everybody started poor so poverty is not a mystery to be solved by intellectuals. Intellectuals have no interest in what creates wealth and what inhibits the creation of wealth. They are very concerned about the distribution of it, but they act as if wealth just exists somehow.

Unless we make revolutionary reforms, some day — in some unknown serra — some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil.

When the people are sheep, the government is always a wolf.