Wealth Inequality Quotes

“The whole problem is wealth redistribution. How can we create equal opportunities for people around the globe? Seems impossible in short term, but it is the ultimate goal of the future.”
― Zoltan Andrejkovics, Together: AI and Human. On The Same Side.

“Tax work less. Tax wealth more.”
― Gary Stevenson

“Well, our economic system "works," it just works in the interests of the masters, and I'd like to see one that works in the interests of the general population. And that will only happen when they are the "principal architects" of policy, to borrow Adam Smith's phrase. I mean, as long as power is narrowly concentrated, whether in the economic or the political system, you know who's going to benefit from the policies―you don't have to be a genius to figure that out. That's why democracy would be a good thing for the general public. But of course, achieving real democracy will require that the whole system of corporate capitalism be completely dismantled―because it's radically anti-democratic. And that can't be done by a stroke of the pen, you know: you have to build up alternative popular institutions, which could allow control over society's investment decisions to be moved into the hands of working people and communities. That's a long job, it requires building up an entire cultural and institutional basis for the changes, it's not something that's just going to happen on its own. There are people who have written about what such a system might look like―kind of a "participatory economy," it's sometimes called. But sure, that's the way to go, I think.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“The concentration of wealth perpetuates the permanence of inequality.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“Western capitalist society, and especially my own American society, is one characterized by great inequalities. In any such society, by the nature of the case, the greatest threat to rightful freedom is always the wealth and power of the privileged. The chief task of the state in protecting human freedom should always be to use rightful state coercion to limit the freedom of the powerful and privileged to infringe the rightful freedom of the less privileged and the vulnerable. Political struggles in the modern world are usually fundamentally struggles about whether state power will be used to protect the rightful freedom of all, or instead used to protect the wrongful freedom of the wealthy, powerful, and privileged. Wide social inequality necessarily indicates that these struggles have come out the wrong way, on behalf of the unjust and oppressive freedom of the privileged against the rightful freedom of the majority.”
― Allen W. Wood, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy

“Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“They'd have us believe if we wear fabulous underwear we'll somehow be above the terrifying statistic that only 1% of the world's wealth belongs to women.”
― Caitlin Moran

“Because [Jeff Bezos] and [Mark Zuckerberg] own $100 billion in the current state of the legal system, the current state of the fiscal system, the current way the international economy is organised, people say, ‘OK, $100 billion, exactly the right level.’ But with a different legal system, different international taxation, it could be 200, it could be 50. So what would be the story? Any level that they will attain, it will be the best? This kind of sacralisation of special individuals is a form of religious thought. People who use this kind of argument: ‘He's great, therefore –‘ therefore what? Therefore we should subsidize him so that he's even richer?”
― Thomas Piketty

“Excessive wealth, like power, tends to corrupt. Even if the rich are not “idle rich”, even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practising greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy. Mr Bader drew the consequences of these insights and refused to become inordinately rich and thus made it possible to build a real community.”
― E F Schumacher, Small is Beautiful Economics as if People Mattered

“The economist J.K. Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society (1958) about 'private affluence and public squalor', demonstrating the pernicious effects on the economy and society of excessive wealth inequality, and the paradox that the wealthy, though gaining from tax cuts and excessive pay, still lost out because the country as a whole was poorer. In 2009, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson applied an epidemiological approach to issues such as violence, obesity and anxiety to demonstrate how the more unequal a society is in terms of wealth and income, the more its social problems worsen for everyone, not only those living in deprivation. Their book The Spirit Level also explored the sociological processes behind these connections, centring on trust and anxiety - how we, as social animals, thrive when we have a secure place in society and a reasonable status.”
― Caroline Lucas, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story

“Persons of limited means who scrimp to save from fifty to seventy-five per cent of income are properly termed misers, and are regarded with pitying scorn; but the rich of today enjoy the doubly paradoxical distinction of being spendthrifts, misers, and philanthropists simultaneously.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“However one approaches the problem of income distribution, one is confronted with substantially the same conclusion: fewer than twenty per cent of the people possess nearly everything while eighty per cent own practically nothing except chattels. Wealth itself has become monopolized.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“All these wasteful expenditures of the rich, only a few of which have been briefly enumerated, are extenuated by hired apologists on the ground that they give many people work in the luxury trades, in domestic service, in the garages, stables, and gardens, and on board the yachts.
It is not realized, it seems, that if the money wasted by the rich in personal indulgence were taken in taxes and put into the building of needed hospitals, schools, playgrounds, clinics, low-rent apartment buildings, farm homes, sanatoria, rest homes, and recreation clubs for the mass of Americans, the persons now given employment by the wealthy would obtain work of a more constructive character in these other fields.”
― Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families

“Today in my view the most serious problem we face as a nation is the grotesque and growing level of wealth and income inequality. This is a profound moral issue, it is an economic issue, and it is a political issue.”
― Bernie Sanders

“It's probably for the best that Van Gogh isn't around to see his work selling for squillions of dollars, as he'd probably start painting for that market. He may have lost an ear, but he'd still have that magic eye and a new nose for a deal. We're denied access to this poor man's genius by having the richest people on earth hanging his life's work in their mansions.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Last year I pledged to give the majority of my wealth back to the society that helped generate it, to do it thoughtfully, to get started soon, and to keep at it until the safe is empty. There's no question in my mind that anyone's personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.”
― MacKenzie Scott

“The rich individuals are increasingly hoarding everything. If the billionaires want to go to space, they could at least leave their money on Earth to solve the critical Earthbound problems. We now have an estimated 2,775 billionaires with a combined net worth of around $13.1 trillion. I have it on good authority that you don't need more than $1 billion to live comfortably. Even if every billionaire kept $1 billion, that would leave around $10 trillion for ending hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction. We should be taxing the vast and rapidly growing billionaire wealth to help finance a civilized world.”
― Jeffrey Sachs