Quotes About Gap Between Rich And Poor

“And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.”

— Adam Hochschild

“Imagine if organized religion organized billions of people and trillions of dollars to tackle the challenges that our economic and political systems are afraid or unwilling to tackle-a planet ravaged by unsustainable human behavior and an out-of-control consumptive economy, the growing gap between the rich minority and the poor majority, and the proliferation of weapons of all kinds-including weapons of mass destruction. "Wow," people frequently say when I propose these possibilities. "If they did that, I might become religious again." Some quickly add, "But I won't hold my breath. It'll never happen.”

— Brian D. McLaren

“Since the gap between the rich countries and the poor can be removed, it will be. If we are shortsighted, inept, incapable either of good-will or enlightened self-interest, then it may be removed to the accompaniment of war and starvation: but removed it will be. The questions are, how, and by whom.”

— C.P. Snow

“Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.”

— David McCullough

“Because it is ignorance about money that causes so much greed and fear," said rich dad. "Let me give you some examples. A doctor, wanting more money to better provide for his family, raises his fees. By raising his fees, it makes health care more expensive for everyone. It hurts the poor people the most, so they have worse health than those with money. Because the doctors raise their fees, the attorneys raise their fees. Because the attorneys' fees have gone up, schoolteachers want a raise, which raises our taxes, and on and on and on. Soon there will be such a horrifying gap between the rich and the poor that chaos will break out and another great civilization will collapse. History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

“If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency. The world would be a different place if instead of competing to have the highest per capita GNP, nations competed to have the highest per capita stocks of wealth with the lowest throughput, or the lowest infant mortality, or the greatest political freedom, or the cleanest environment, or the smallest gap between the rich and the poor.”

— Donella H. Meadows

“And we're in the middle of a 'perfect storm.' These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

“The gap between the rich and poor is widening fast.”

— Richard Rogers

“I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.”

— Richard Rogers

“Consistently rated the most peaceable of all countries in the world by the Global Peace Index, Iceland has reduced its military expenditure to zero, has no armed forces, and has reduced the inequality gap between rich and poor.”

— Scilla Elworthy

“We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.”

— Stuart Rose

“The gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. There's a hangar at the Cairo airport for private jets, billionaires are on the Forbes list, and Egypt's annual per-capita income is two thousand dollars. How can you sustain that?”

— Mohamed ElBaradei

“The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.”

— Helene D. Gayle

“Correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their employees but also in the high cost of education, the incredible divide between private and public schools that makes all of the fine speeches by our policy makers- most of whom send their children to private schools anyway, just as they enjoy the benefits and perks of their jobs as servants of the people- all the more insidious and insincere.”

— Azar Nafisi

“I do not believe in widening the income gap between rich and poor, and my life's work in the inner city of Detroit demonstrates that far more than any sound bite.”

— Clark Durant

“In Finland, where 80 percent of workers belong to unions, all employees enjoy at least 30 days paid vacation, and the gap between the rich and poor is far more equitable than in the United States.”

— Bernie Sanders

“The gap between rich and poor under President Obama is getting bigger because fewer well-paying jobs are available. Corporations are being taxed to the hilt and are loathe to add more workers. Thus, salaries fall because there are more than enough applicants to fill any job vacancy.”

— Bill O'Reilly

“This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.”

— Susan George

“It's not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter.”

— Emma Thompson

“Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can't. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.”

— Erica Jong

“We've got to do more to ensure that people who work full time are not living in poverty and that the massive gap between rich and poor - which is fundamentally un-American, as far as I'm concerned - is somehow dealt with.”

— Eric Schneiderman

“This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It's not politically viable; it's not morally right; it's just not going to happen.”

— Michael Bloomberg

“The world has also learned that economic growth, by itself, cannot close the gap between rich and poor.”

— Dalai Lama XIV

“I think that the main issue with inequality is not the gap between the rich and the poor. It is the gap between the earnings of top business leaders and the salaries of academics and journalists.”

— Arnold Kling

“The gap between the rich and the poor is wider in the United States than it is in any of the other industrialized nations.”

— Gerald Celente

“The gap between the rich and poor is growing among and within most nations. The political and social effects of unequal location of energy and other mineral resources are acute. Population numbers continue to climb. The global environment shows signs of widespread deterioration. Both natural and social environments are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic disturbances ... There may, however, be a cheering challenge in the possibility that out of its struggle with these realities the human race may move a bit nearer to behaving as if it were indeed one family.”

— Gilbert F. White

“The issue of world environment has a special kind of urgency ... The issue is one of rich peoples and poor peoples, of the growing gap between the two, and of the rich fouling their own nests.”

— Gilbert F. White

“We are developing in the United States a huge underclass of unwanted people, many of them the descendants of the exploitation of the South American and Latin American countries by American piratical capitalism. Not all capitalism is piratical, but some of it certainly is. And we have a fantastic gap beginning to exist between rich and poor.”

— Benedict Groeschel

“The main issue [of the Scientific Revolution] is that the people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.”

— C.P. Snow

“The poor, no less than the rich, stay tuned in to the Dream Machine in bad times as well as good ... By 1995, millions of the poor were left without housing, medical care; jobs, or educational opportunity; six million children-one of every four kids under 6 years of age in America-were officially poor. Mired in Third-World conditions of poverty while video-bombarded with First-World dreams, rarely has a population suffered a greater gap between socially cultivated appetites and socially available opportunities.”

— Charles Derber

“When fewer workers have unions, the standard of living falls for everyone and the gap between the rich and poor grows.”

— John Sweeney

“Peace is a culture that we create by putting it in the curriculum for young people, through creating this next generation where young people get a chance to go across borders, across cultures, to learn more about each other's life, to create a global community, learn about opportunities for helping others. It's investing in peace and tolerance training, ending the gap between rich and poor.”

— Craig Kielburger

“The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.”

— Kwame Nkrumah

“Bad schools, crime, drugs, high taxes, the social security mess, racism, the health care ? crisis? unemployment, welfare state dependency, illegitimacy, the gap between rich and poor. What do these issues have in common? Politicians, the media, and our so-called leaders lie to us about them. They lie about the cause. They lie about the effect. They lie about the solutions.”

— Larry Elder

“We are living in an historic moment. We are each called to take part in a great transformation. Our survival as a species is threatened by global warming, economic meltdown, and an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor. Yet these threats offer an opportunity to awaken as an interconnected and beloved community.”

— Desmond Tutu

“I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“We have very stable mechanisms of conflict resolution in terms of labor relations, we have a very good transportation infrastructure, we provide our children with an excellent education and the gap between rich and poor in Germany is relatively narrow. On the other hand, we have trouble accepting change.”

— Angela Merkel

“In our society competitive capitalism has put family life and working life on a collision course.In Canada statistics show that over 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled and the sick falls on women most of whom receive no pay for these very essential tasks.Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of capitalism, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and thus increase the gap between them.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“Given the fact that poverty is growing, more and more Americans are losing health insurance, health care costs are going up, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider.That speaks to the weakness of the opposition. People do not like George W. Bush. But I think it's fair to say that they are not flocking to the Democratic Party, or see the Democrats as a real alternative.”

— Bernie Sanders

“The power of capitalism to mediate the gap between rich and poor is pretty incredible. Indeed, I think, year by year, the gap gets less.”

— Bill Gates

“Yes, over the centuries economic progress has reduced some gross disparities - modern Americans are relatively unlikely to simply starve to death (though it can happen), so in that sense the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the question isn't whether society is, in some sense, more equal than it was in 1900. It's whether it is radically more unequal than it was in 1970. And of course it is.”

— Paul Krugman

“If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing ...”

— Charles Stross

“Nowadays, we are confronted by a huge gap between rich and poor. This is not only morally wrong, but practically a mistake. It leads to the rich living in anxiety and the poor living in frustration, which has the potential to lead to more violence. We have to work to reduce this gap. It's truly unfair that some people should have so much while others go hungry.”

— Dalai Lama