Relative Deprivation Quotes

I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.

I didn't grow up in a wealthy family at all. Being at home all day and watching movies, that was a luxury.

People laugh to forget their troubles, and to forget their troubles they like to look at people who aren't doing better than they are.

Many of our miseries are merely comparative: we are often made unhappy, not by the presence of any real evil, but by the absence of some fictitious good; of something which is not required by any real want of nature, which has not in itself any power of gratification, and which neither reason nor fancy would have prompted us to wish, did we not see it in the possession of others.

Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you're in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you're in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in... you're exposed to people with more.

There's always going to be somebody worse off than me.

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.

At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers - not even corrupt ones. It's directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It's directed at the husband of your wife's sister, because he earns 20 percent more than you do.

Distress: A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.

I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.

I never felt poor. Our family euphemism was that we were broke, which I think psychologically gave you a different feeling. There were people far worse than we were.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.

The reality in the neighborhood that I live in is: if I don't constantly reconcile what I have against what other people don't, either I need to leave and be around other people who have what I have, or I'm constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing.

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.

The rich are more envied by those who have a little, than by those who have nothing.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

A poverty that is universal may be cheerfully borne; it is an individual poverty that is painful and humiliating.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

You know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? That's the way some of us feel about people.

Sometimes it looks as if, the better off they [nations] become, the bigger do they conceive the gap between what is actually their lot and what would be desirable, while in the poor countries large masses of people seem to be satisfied by merely surviving.

My mama couldn't give me what I wanted. I had all right clothes, but the people I was with had better clothes. I felt that I had to have better clothes.

We have white people problems in America. You know what that is? That's when your life is amazing, so you just make stuff up to get worried about.