Steven Weinberg Quotes

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

I don't subscribe to the view that people who are better off don't want to live in a more equal society.

I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth ought not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration.

As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty spread and special privilege grow.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

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

I started out young and idealistic, and it was all about social justice and fair distribution of resources. I didn't understand why everybody couldn't be equally prosperous.

Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.

The superrich should pay higher taxes in order to restore the inclusive society that I grew up in.

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

The social order we have built recognizes no exploitation of man by man. In our country there are no rich people to live at the expense of the workers and peasants. Just as there are no poor people living on the charity of others.

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

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

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.