Johann Georg Zimmermann Quotes

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.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty.

Well, you can do whatever you want, but just don’t call it inequality. Put the word poverty there. Because we have many rich people on our board, and when they see the word poverty that makes them feel good, because [it means] they’re really nice people who care about the poor. When they see the word inequality it makes them upset, because [it means] you want to take money from them.

Poverty is a great equalizer

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

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.

Share the Wealth

Redistribution of wealth has rarely been from the rich to the poor. Usually it is from the poor and middle class to the rich.

Only the poor are forbidden to beg.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

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.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

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

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.