Blick Bassy Quotes

It is not fair that some people should have a better chance in life simply because of where they live.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

The greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege and unequal distribution of wealth.

Just because I get to coast around in a nice, cushy little bubble, that's not how it is for everybody.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks.

I don't care about wealth. What seems to be upsetting is institutionalizing the advantages that wealth gives you.

Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of the unequal distribution of the wealth and the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.

I'm not interested in defending the position of those who already have money, power and privilege.

There's a lot of freedom to do anything you want in Mexico. It's just that that freedom belongs to a few. It's a huge country with a big contrast. There is this big inequality, so those like us that have the chance to do things, we know we are very lucky.

All of us kids in the neighbourhood had to go shoeless for the same reason - all except the landlord's son, because his father had more income.

When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.

All countries have poor people. Yet it's a very rare country which understands the indignities of poverty, while education systems maintain the status quo. The children of the elite go to the best schools and get the best jobs, not because they are the best. We're not taking advantage of the intellectual power on this planet.