Words of departed champions of greater equity, from Plato and Prince to Kahlo and Keller.
“Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes…God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
American civil rights leader, November 4, 1956
“Even the very rich cannot escape into their own little bubble of purity and excellence, of “haute” this and “haute” that. Ride around in a limo and you still have to sit in traffic created by ordinary people who can’t afford to live near where they work. Fly in a private jet and you’re still dependent on archaic, under-financed, systems of air traffic control…Oh, and you lobbied against higher taxes and regulations on business? Then think twice before you sink your teeth into that chocolate and gold dessert. The vermin are always with you.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich
American author, The Nation, November 17, 2007
“It is not great wealth in a few individuals that proves a country is prosperous, but great general wealth evenly distributed among the people . . . It is the struggling masses who are the foundation [of this country]; and if the foundation be rotten or insecure, the rest of the structure must eventually crumble.”
–Victoria Woodhull
First woman to run for President of the United States, 1872
“There is so much wealth and so much misery at the same time, that it seems incredible that people can endure such class difference, and accept such a form of hunger while on the other hand, the millionaires throw away millions on stupidities.”
–Frida Kahlo
Mexican artist, writing about New York City in the 1930s
“I am weary seeing our laboring classes so wretchedly housed, fed, and clothed, while thousands of dollars are wasted every year over unsightly statues. If these great men must have outdoor memorials, let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor.”
–Elizabeth Cady Stanton
American suffragist, 1886
“We must work together to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity, and power in our society.”
–Nelson Mandela
President of South Africa, State of the Nation Address, February 9, 1996
“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States senator.”
–Mary Harris Jones (“Mother Jones”)
U.S. labor and community organizer, speech at Coney Island, 1903
“Yet hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.”
–Sitting Bull
Lakota leader (1831-1890), at the Powder River Council, 1877
“We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.”
–Shirley Chisholm
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1969 to 1983
“We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.”
–W.E.B. Du Bois American sociologist, On the Future of the American Negro, March 1953
“The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands — the ownership and control of their livelihoods — are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
– Helen Keller
First deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree, essay in Out of the Dark, 1913
“Everybody’s talkin’ about hard times
Like it just started yesterday
People eye know they’ve been strugglin’
At least it seems that way
Fat cats on Wall Street
They got a bailout
While somebody else got to wait
Seven hundred billion but my old neighborhood
Ain’t nothing changed but the date”
– Prince
American musician, “Ol’ Skool Company” album, 2009
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
–Oliver Goldsmith
Anglo-Irish writer (1730-1774)
“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”
–Stephen Hawking
English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author (1942-2018)
“The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.”
–Noah Webster
American editor and writer (1758-1843)
“So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough.”
[King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1]
–William Shakespeare
English playwright (1564-1616)
“In the long run men inevitably become the victims of their wealth. They adapt their lives and habits to their money, not their money to their lives. It preoccupies their thoughts, creates artificial needs, and draws a curtain between them and the world.”
–Herbert Croly
U.S. political philosopher (1869-1930)
“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
–Adam Smith
Scottish political economist (1723-1790)
“No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.”
–Henry George
American political economist (1839-1897)
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman
American poet (1819-1892)
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
–Plutarch
Ancient Greek biographer (c. 46 – 120 CE)
“A State divided into a small number of rich and a large number of poor will always develop a government manipulated by the rich to protect the amenities represented by their property.”
–Harold Laski
British political theorist (1893-1950)
“Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people.”
–Sidney and Beatrice Webb
English social critics (1923)
“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.”
–Henry David Thoreau
American philosopher (1817-1862)
“Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”
–Walter Bagehot
English economist (1826-1877)
“The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”
–Theodore Roosevelt
U.S. President (1858-1919)
“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly. The rich have always objected to being governed at all.”
–G. K. Chesterton
English essayist (1874-1936)
“Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.”
–George Bernard Shaw
Anglo-Irish playwright (1856-1950)
“Behind every great fortune is a crime.”
–Honore de Balzac
French novelist (1799-1850)
“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
–Louis Brandeis
U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1856-1941)
“Money is like muck, not good except that it be spread.”
–Francis Bacon
English philosopher (1561-1626)
“The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues—not faction, but rather distraction—there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.”
–Plato
Greek philosopher (427-347 B.C.)
“If you gain fame, power, or wealth, you won’t have any trouble finding lovers, but they will be people who love fame, power, or wealth.”
–Philip Slater
American sociologist (1927-2013), in Wealth Addiction (1980)
“When a working stiff demands a pay raise, it causes inflation and threatens the nation’s prosperity; when a C.E.O. gets a raise ten thousand times as large, it rewards enterprise and assures all our futures. The two phenomena, obviously, are totally separate. Only a fool or a journalist could confuse them.”
–John Cassidy
American journalist, The New Yorker, April 21, 1997
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
–Franklin D. Roosevelt
U.S. President (1882-1945), second inaugural address, 1937
“How does one put together a democracy based on the concept of equality while running an economy with ever greater degrees of economic inequality?”
–Lester Thurow
American economist (1938-2016), Shifting Fortunes (1999)
“To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable.”
–Edgar Bronfman
Canadian businessman (1929-2013)
“There’s no more central theme in the Bible than the immorality of inequality. Jesus speaks more about the gap between rich and poor than he does about heaven and hell.”
–Jim Wallis
American religious leader and editor, Sojourners magazine (1999)
“Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville
French political analyst (1805-1859), Democracy in America, 1831.
“If our civilization is destroyed, it will not be by barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.”
–Henry Demarest Lloyd
American journalist (1847-1903)
“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”
–John Maynard Keynes
British economist (1883-1946)
“One of the regrettable, if diverting, effects of extreme inequality is its tendency to weaken the capacity for impartial judgment. It pads the lives of its beneficiaries with a soft down of consideration, while relieving them of the vulgar necessity of justifying their pretensions, and secures that, if they fall, they fall on cushions.”
–R. H. Tawney
British social scientist (1880-1962), Equality (1938)
“The liberty of the strong, whether their strength is physical or economic, must be restrained.”
–Isaiah Berlin
British political philosopher (1909-1997)
