Katie Melua Quotes

There is just as much evil in all of us as there is good. We're all continuously guilty, even if we're not doing it intentionally to be evil. Here we are sitting in luxury hotels, living it up on the the backs of others in the third world. We all have a guilty conscience, but we do very little about it.

But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a moldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children?

The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

I think, collectively, we should be paying more attention to what is going on around us in the world among people who don't have the advantages that we have.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

China is a country, still, of great contrast. While hundreds of millions of people are part of the middle class and yearn for things made in America - American brands, movies, music - there are other hundreds of millions of people throughout China who are living on the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day.

It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.

I couldn't feel good about myself hanging out in Armani clothes when my girlfriend can't even pay her heating bill. I'd feel foul and I'd be embarrassed.

Part of the problem I find with money books is that there's this whole set of money books that make you feel almost guilty to spend a dollar.

In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

I had hoped that foreboding economic circumstances would have caused the ultra-rich to think not just of themselves and increasing their own personal affluence. Unfortunately, however, too many of them lack concern, and without this concern, the divisive imbalance will only worsen with recession.

I'm ashamed to say that I'm from a very privileged background.

I really feel kind of guilty spending 80 million dollars. People are starving in the world.

We think we have a responsibility. And I think it's important for all of us in the Western world to realize that we've all been blessed a lot and if you go to these parts they don't have a lot, even before the tsunami.

I realize that I'm in the top one percent of the world. I've traveled a lot. I've seen immense poverty in the world, and I can't live with everything I've had and be comfortable with everything I have unless I do something for the rest of the world.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

I was long brought up to think that it was nothing short of a crime to miss a sale.

I'm just a guy who wears TOMS. It's the sad truth.

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

The 400 of us [the richest Americans] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you're in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.