These inequality quotes will inspire you. Inequality, the quality of being unequal or uneven or difference in size, degree, circumstances, etc.; lack of equality.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging inequality quotes, inequality sayings, and inequality proverbs.
Best Inequality Quotes
- “Inequality is the root of social evil.” ~ Pope Francis
- “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” ~ Aristotle
- “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” ~ Adam Smith
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“A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much and so many have so little.” ~ Bernie Sanders
- “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.” ~ Dalai Lama
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“Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another… Inequality undermines democracy.” ~ George Packer
- “Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.” ~ Paul Krugman
- “It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.” ~ Voltaire
- “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 little.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “Inequalities of Fate very curious. Should like, on this account, to believe in Reincarnation.” ~ E. M. Delafield
- “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” ~ Plutarch
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“It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.” ~ Felix Frankfurter
- “Rising inequality is a cultural and economic cancer on a lot of different levels.” ~ Kevin Drum
- “Excessive economic, social and cultural inequalities among peoples arouse tensions and conflicts, and are a danger to peace.” ~ Pope Paul VI , Economic inequality quotes
- “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” ~ Pope Francis
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“It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics.” ~ Paul Wellstone
- “There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “The only living societies are those which are animated by inequality and injustice.” ~ Paul Claudel
- “Inequality promotes progress.” ~ James Cook
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“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “No sustainable development, environmental harmony or lasting security will happen if we are unable to eradicate hunger and extreme inequality” ~ Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
- “A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.” ~ Thomas Carlyle , Inequality quotes workplace
- “The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ….As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to ‘remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'” ~ Adam Smith
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“Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men?” ~ Dorothy Thompson
- “If you’re perpetuating discrimination, you’re perpetuating inequality.” ~ Ellen Page
- “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” ~ Paulo Freire
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“True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.” ~ Felix Schelling
- “To every woman who gave birth, to every citizen and taxpayer, it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women of the United States of America!” ~ Patricia Arquette
- “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
- “Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.” ~ Michael Mandelbaum
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“Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated.” ~ Tyler Cowen
- “A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality – and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing – it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.” ~ George Carlin
- “The inequality between the world’s individuals is staggering.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
- “You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.” ~ Rem Koolhaas
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“Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.” ~ Robert Reich
- “Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.” ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- “Racial inequality has gotten worse in the last years because any time you have a moribund economy, the people who historically have had more problems getting jobs have suffered. And that, I think, is triggering a lot of the animosity.” ~ Victor Davis Hanson
- “People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community.” ~ Pope Leo XIII
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“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
- “Racial inequality is a big problem.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” ~ Roald Dahl
- “The important issue is not how much inequality there is but how much opportunity there is for individuals to get out of the bottom classes and into the top. If there is enough movement upward, people will accept the efficiency of the markets. If you have opportunity, there is a great tolerance for inequality. That has been the saving grace of the American system.” ~ Milton Friedman
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“Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn’t mean they are right, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.” ~ Chris Hayes
- “The great biblical tradition enjoins on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor. It bids us break the bonds of injustice and oppression which give rise to glaring, and indeed scandalous, social inequalities.” ~ Pope Francis
- “The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.” ~ Julian Bond
- “If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” ~ J. K. Rowling
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“You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.” ~ Amartya Sen
- “That nations that have gone for equality, like Communism, have neither freedom nor justice nor equality, they’ve the greatest inequalities of all, the privileges of the politicians are far greater compared with the ordinary folk than in any other country. The nations that have gone for freedom, justice and independence of people have still freedom and justice, and they have far more equality between their people, far more respect for each individual than the other nations. Go my way. You will get freedom and justice and much less difference between people than you do in the Soviet Union.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
- “We are here because we share a fundamental belief: that poverty, illiteracy, disease and inequality do not belong in the twenty-first century. We share a common purpose: to eradicate these ills for the benefit of all. And we share a common tool to achieve this: the Millennium Development Goals.” ~ Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
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“God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received.” ~ Johannes Tauler
- “The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.” ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “On inequality, I contend that far too much of the nation’s wealth and income is gravitating to too few. This undermines the democracy we all cherish and the overall social cohesion necessary to maintain our wonderfully successful society.” ~ James Stone
- “Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.” ~ Adam Smith
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“Early investment in the lives of disadvantaged children will help reduce inequality, in both the short and the long run.” ~ James Heckman
- “A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.” ~ Lewis Mumford
- “However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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“Do not banish reason for inequality, but let your reason serve to make the truth appear where it seems hid, and hide the false seems true.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “The higher the coefficient of inequality (Gini coefficient) in a society, the worse things tend to be for those at the bottom.” ~ Catherine Wilson
- “If we don’t rebuild that connection with people we will really find even bigger gaps, because our gap on inequality is not just economic.” ~ Hillary Clinton
- “Economic inequality is systemic, and one of the most effective barriers is ignorance about how money works beyond the basics.” ~ Stacey Abrams
