Socioeconomic Gap Quotes

I've spent the last year listening to Americans, and the state of the union that George W. Bush lives in is very different from the state that most hardworking Americans are living in.

The need is schools dedicated exclusively to the rural segment. If we have a child from a village and a city studying in the same class room, the former is bound to lag behind because children from the urban areas have a better start.

People got to realize that the owners who been paying me are a lot richer than I am. It's not like I was born rich; I had to play basketball to make this type of money.

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.

Many people believe in eliminating gaps and eliminating poverty. They don't realize that in some sense those two things are antithetical. If you were to double everyone's income, or if everyone's income were doubled naturally over the course of time, then you would reduce poverty significantly but you would have also increased the gap.

When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.

Half the world does not know how the other half lives.

One of the biggest divides in Canada - I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career - is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they're mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue.

Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time.

The gap between the rich and the poor is the most dangerous threat to world peace we have.

An increasing number of people are growing uncomfortable with the gulf between the world's rich and the poor. Ostentatiously splashing your money around simply draws attention to that disparity, and to your own position on the lucky higher ground. It suggests a callousness, an inhumanity, a let's-just-rub-their-noses-in-it arrogance.

We are living at a time where a handful of people have wealth beyond comprehension - huge yachts, jet planes, tens of billions of dollars, more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. But at the same time, millions of people are struggling to feed their families or put a roof over their heads or find the money to go to a doctor.

Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross.

Technology tools such as laptops are the kind of help that we need. A program that provides laptops for all youngsters would close a gap that most of us are not aware of, or will not admit to, which is a tremendous gap in the poor communities.

Being a foreigner - especially a white and relatively wealthy one - in poor, underdeveloped countries is inherently fraught.

Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.

The term 'income inequality' is a bit misleading because it suggests in a somewhat pejorative way that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor.

Here in Havana where families make about $20 a month, fewer than 5 percent have Internet in their homes, they are prepared. But it's hard to predict how sweeping this change will be, if the people of Cuba are even ready for it.

The contrast of the world that we live in and the world that is here in Aspen and the world inhabited by women who have no resources, little or no, very few resources - huge disparity.

He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

It is dangerously destabilizing to have half the world on the cutting edge of technology while the other half struggles on the bare edge of survival.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

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.

We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.