Thomas Aquinas Quotes

We need to make sure that we're not in a society that is unbalanced and unfair and where the richest Americans are taking advantage of everybody else.

During the last two years the wealthiest 14 Americans saw their wealth increase by $157 billion. This is truly unbelievable. This $157 billion INCREASE in wealth among 14 individuals is more wealth that is owned, collectively, by 130 million Americans. This country does not survive morally, economically or politically when so few have so much, and so many have so little.

As riches increase and accumulate in few hands . . . the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

If someone offered me a hundred million dollars to make a movie? I would first remind him that there are 850 million people in the world who don't have enough to eat.

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.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

Only the poor are forbidden to beg.

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

An equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

No harm is done by the possession of Luxury by some people if only at the same time EVERYBODY HAS ENOUGH. The wrong incurred by the rich toward the poor lies solely in the fact that while they revel, the poor starve

Top 1 Percent progressivism emphasizes the idea of fairness - but it's nevertheless a politics of outrage, animated by at least a trace of envy. It's as if 'millionaires and billionaires' were the principal problem facing America today.

Israel's middle class is paying for those below it, and that's fine, but also for those who are above it, and that's very wrong.

It's almost impossible to have security at the expense of insecurity of others. It's almost impossible to have prosperity when there is a huge problem of poverty and backwardness all over the world.

The accumulation and cross-generational transmission of wealth in the United States has gone way too far. When a young hedge-fund manager can take home a sum reminiscent of the gross national product of a small country, something is askew.

One of the great conundrums in philanthropy globally is that the way wealth creation happens itself often creates the inequities in society.

Critics say the OWS protesters hate the rich. Come on! Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning - they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

For all riches come from iniquity, and unless one were to lose another could not gain. Hence the common adage seems to me to be very true: The rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one.

Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight - the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties.