Economic Injustice Quotes

#1. If Americans actually understood the structure of our taxes, they would not only become angry, they might also find our economic and political systems intolerable because they are the cause of our unjust tax codes ... We could revolutionize the financial conditions of every American city and town - solve all or most of its tax revenue problems - if the property tax system were simply extended from tangible property to also include intangible property. If you want some quick solutions to our nation's fiscal problems, that would be one. Even on the simple basis of fairness, how can we justify having a property tax system that exempts the intangible property owned mostly by the richest amongst us? What a prime example of the Occupy movement's central point about the economic injustice perpetrated by the 1 percent against the 99 percent. #Quote by Richard D. Wolff

#2. I believe that those who believe in the power of human rights must find new ways to address economic injustice - and on a scale commensurate with the millions of people around the world that are mired in poverty. #Quote by Pamela Yates

#3. I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system - these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking. #Quote by Vandana Shiva

#4. It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line. #Quote by Bill Pascrell

#5. The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice runs thus:
At the time of Men at Arms, Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.
Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.
Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month. #Quote by Terry Pratchett

#6. There is a great loneliness of spirit today. We're trying to live, we're trying to cope in the face of what seems to be overwhelming evidence that who we are doesn't matter, that there is no real hope for enough change, that the environment and human experience is deteriorating so rapidly and increasingly and massively. This is the context, psychically and spiritually, in which we are working today. This is how our lives are reflected to us. Meanwhile, we're yearning for connection with each other, with ourselves, with the powers of nature, the possibilities of being alive.

When that tension arises, we feel pain, we feel anguish at the very root of ourselves, and then we cover that over, that grief, that horror, with all kinds of distraction – with consumerism, with addictions, with anything that we can use to disconnect and to go away.

We've been opening ourselves to the grief, to the knowing of what's taking place, the loss of species, the destruction of the natural world, the unimaginable levels of social injustice and economic injustice that deprive so many human beings of basic opportunities. And as we open to the pain of that, there's a possibility of embracing that pain and that grief in a way that it becomes a strength, a power to respond. There is the possibility that the energy that has been bound in the repression of it can now flow through us and energize us, make us clearer, more alive, more passionate, committed, courageous, determined peo #Quote by John Robbins

#7. Whilst the earlier forms of oppression confronted by Gandhi and King were in decline, when King turned his attention to economic injustice, it was another matter. He had come to realize that the fundamental, underlying injustice in American life was the exclusion of the poor of all races and cultures from the opportunity to attain even the bare minimum of the necessities of life. Martin King, then, entered a new and different arena. He was involved no longer in fighting regional, social injustice but rather in attempting to confront the core issue of economic injustice in American society, which went hand in hand with waging a costly war and the growth of militarism. This new struggle brought him into direct conflict with the federal government and its numerous agency surrogates whose mission it was to serve and protect American corporate interests at home and abroad. The new post-war corporate colonialism was very far from being a spent force in 1968. If his opposition to the war was unacceptable to the corporate beneficiaries, the Poor People's Campaign was intolerable. Not only could it turn into a revolution which could only be stopped, if at all, by the massacre of Americans but, in the very least, millions of Americans would unavoidably be required to see for themselves the previously unseen massive number of their impoverished fellow citizens. #Quote by William F. Pepper

#8. I want to be clear that I'm not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that "doing nothing" - in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen - entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider "doing nothing" both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully. On this level, the practice of doing nothing has several tools to offer us when it comes to resisting the attention economy.

The first tool has to do with repair. In such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for "doing nothing" is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves - individually or collectively. There is a kind of nothing that's necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. #Quote by Jenny Odell

#9. The long-simmering anger at racism and economic injustice of alienated black youth in the ghettoes was erupting into violent and destructive urban insurrections. In every case these "riots" were triggered by police brutality or misconduct, most usually the killing or brutalizing of an unarmed black man. #Quote by H. Rap Brown

#10. We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice. #Quote by Freeman Dyson

#11. I worked up a daily fury about some economic injustice because there were so many of them. #Quote by Sylvia Porter

#12. Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them. #Quote by Thomas Sowell

#13. Economics seeks to be a science. Science is supposed to be objective and it is difficult to be scientific when the subject matter, the participant in the economic process, lacks objectivity. #Quote by George Soros

#14. The real meaning of economic equality is "To each according to his need." #Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

#15. There will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obligated to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. #Quote by Plato

#16. In Neverfell's face the clouds broke, and her smile came out like the sun. She could not read his mind as he could read hers. She clearly had no idea of the calculations behind his decision. He could see that she believed he had been overcome by the injustice of the situation and instantly decided to right it. He felt a shock, as if her faith was a golden axe and had struck right through his dusty husk of a heart. The heart did not bleed, however, and in the next moment its dry fibres were closing and knitting back together again. #Quote by Frances Hardinge

#17. what economic benefit smokers provide for nonsmokers (they die earlier, leaving more Social Security and pension benefits for the rest of us), #Quote by Charles Wheelan

#18. In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable. #Quote by Peter Dicken

#19. Economic growth and human development need to go hand in hand. Human values need to be advocated vigorously. #Quote by Kailash Satyarthi

#20. It's not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it's the most patriotic thing we can do. #Quote by E.A. Bucchianeri

#21. Exploitation of the Negro through economic restriction and segregation the present system is sound and will doubtless continue until this gives place to the saner policy of actual interracial cooperation
not the present farce of racial manipulation in which the Negro is a figurehead. #Quote by Carter G. Woodson

#22. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. #Quote by Carl Schmitt

#23. Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call 'physics envy'. We wish that 99 percent of economic behavior could be captured by three simple laws of nature. In fact, economists have 99 laws that capture 3 percent of behavior. Economics is a uniquely human endeavor ... #Quote by Andrew Lo

#24. [T]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men. #Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

#25. Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon. #Quote by George Monbiot

#26. If you want to know what the biggest thing in your way to an improved standard of living, higher pay, a more rewarding career is: Barack Obama and the Democrat Party and their economic policies. They are the roadblock. #Quote by Rush Limbaugh

#27. The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in turn, increases suspicions in the investment community that fossil fuel stocks are overvalued. The benefit of an accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy from the start, is that it has the potential to turn the screws on the industry much tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is better able to compete directly with fossil fuels, while bolstering the frontline land defenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their communities. #Quote by Naomi Klein

#28. Democracy is the absolute value that makes for human dignity, as well as the only road to sustained economic development and social justice. #Quote by Kim Dae-jung

#29. If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power. #Quote by Thomas Sowell

#30. We insist no one be compelled to take antipsychotic drugs until he becomes so deranged that he is in 'imminent danger' and a judge has to intervene to save his life. If we really believed that forced treatment was an injustice and forced medication was cruel, then why would we allow a judge to impose it as a last resort to save a life? #Quote by Pete Earley

#31. Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter. #Quote by Karl Polanyi

#32. I have never forgotten how the deprivation of work erodes human beings, those not working and those related to them. And from that time on, I loathed an economic that could put a huge part of its workforce on the streets with no compunction. #Quote by Herbert Schiller

#33. Some of the most serious fallacies of traditional economics have been due to confusion between optimum and equilibrium conditions; the apparent influence of Dr. Pangloss upon the development of economic thought is for the most part nothing but pure intellectual error. #Quote by Sir John Richard Hicks

#34. I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically. #Quote by Naomi Wolf

#35. Of this violence and injustice that reign in the world, I will say
The bank of justice is bankrupt, even the time #Quote by Hanane Andalucia

#36. Data Products are self-adapting, broadly applicable economic engines that derive their value from data and generate more data by influencing human behavior or by making inferences or predictions upon new data. #Quote by Benjamin Bengfort

#37. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. #Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#38. China has seen a great deal of economic progress. It's certainly rather of a miracle. The growing role of the market in the economy will force China to open up its political system over time and to move toward a more democratic society. So taken as a whole, the one real failure in this whole business has been Russia. #Quote by Milton Friedman

#39. Black men, Indian men, and gay men have all have something in common: They do not provide an economic security blanket for women. #Quote by Warren Farrell

#40. Republicans have been running on tax-cut proposals since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Tax-rate reductions and simplifications are urgently needed. But again, there is no mention of the key problems of a global economy in decline - of the acceptance by economic elites of inevitable and irremediable stagnation. We have not faced the fact that the Federal Reserve's capacity to command growth is a god that has failed. #Quote by George Gilder

#41. Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it. #Quote by Plato

#42. God has endowed us with a capacity to love, of necessity there must be within that capacity the ability to manifest anger. If there were no possibility of showing anger there would be no possibility of manifesting love because anger is the response to wounded love. Anger is the rightful response to some wrong or injustice; and if there were no standards of right and of justice, there could be no anger. But because the Bible sets forth standards of right and justice, there will be anger when one beholds violated rights or injustices. #Quote by J. Dwight Pentecost

#43. Yes, disappointment over perceived unfairness, injustice, promises not kept, tends to go hand in hand with increasing prosperity. Expectations are dashed. What can I say! #Quote by Mary Douglas

#44. My title is intended to suggest that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated. #Quote by Michael Polanyi

#45. I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope. #Quote by Kenneth Tynan

#46. If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons. #Quote by Michelle Alexander

#47. What we see today then is not an emerging India but a re-emerging one. A nation slowly reclaiming its rightful place at the top of the world's economic pyramid. #Quote by Sidin Vadukut

#48. The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight. #Quote by Malcolm X

#49. Economic support from the rest of the Arab states to the fledgling Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is virtually non-existent. #Quote by Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#50. It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly - endemic to the system. #Quote by Iain Banks

#51. If Britain becomes a member of the Community, it will be healthier for Britain, advantageous for Europe, and a gain for the whole world. I do not know of many economic or political problems in the world which will be easier to solve if Britain is outside rather than inside the Community. #Quote by James Callaghan

#52. I'd be happy to have regular face-to-face meetings at Downing Street with David Cameron to argue the case for alternative economic policies. #Quote by Frances O'Grady

#53. The federal budget deficit isn't the nation's major economic problem and deficit reduction shouldn't be our major goal.
Our problem is lack of good jobs and sufficient growth, and our goal must be to revive both. #Quote by Robert Reich

#54. Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. #Quote by Herbert Marcuse