437 Quotes About Inequality

I wanted to write a book about poverty that didn’t focus exclusively on poor people or poor places. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor people and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor people and rich people together in mutual dependence and trigger. Eviction was such a process.

Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

It’s not right that some people have so much and others have so little.

Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don't see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there's only one escape hatch, ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety. pg 311

The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.

People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn't reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.

The golf links lie so near the millThat almost every dayThe laboring children can look outAnd see the men at play.

For Sonny, the problem with America wasn't segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.