Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.
There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people.
There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. 'Elysium' could be a metaphor for just Jo'burg, but it's also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction, separation of wealth is a really interesting idea to mess with.
I'm so much more famous than I am financially successful.
A pauper in the midst of wealth.
Not everybody here is rich. Not everybody here is independently wealthy. Not everybody here is free from any kind of economic concern. We run the gamut here, too. It's the opportunity to escape that that exists here, for very specific reasons. But it's not because the US is where it is. It's not because our DNA is different than anybody else's. It's because of the way we have structured our affairs, our government.
Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.
When I look out [the window] at the big houses on either side of the road, it's obvious we've entered the rich side of town. Poor people don't post signs like NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE DRIVE, PRIVATE PROPERTY, MONITORED BY CAMERA SURVEILLANCE. I should know because I've been poor my entire life, and the only person I know who ever posted a sign like these is my friend...and he actually stole the sign off a rich guy's yard.
Pity the poor millionaire. He'll never know the thrill of paying that final installment.
How low, how little are the proud, How indigent the great!
A lot of people don't know the culture shock of how you can be in a rich area and then be in poverty. People don't know how different it is over there.
I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
While so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. The television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society.
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.
I never had the financial means that the media said I had. I laugh when I hear the amounts, $400 million, $800 million. Where do they get this imagination?
Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection.
There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.
A newspaper man wrote an article that I had 300 million dollars, well, I wish I had a million dollars
