Quotes & Sayings About Distribution Of Wealth

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth. — Dolores Huerta

Their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good. Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire — Andrew Carnegie

There is no escaping the fact, however, that social science research on the distribution of wealth was for a long time based on a relatively limited set of firmly established facts together with a wide variety of purely theoretical speculations. — Thomas Piketty

China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable. — Sun Yat-sen

The only distribution of wealth which is the product of labor, which will be honest, will come through a more equal distribution of the productive capacity of men. — Leland Stanford

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life. — G.H. Hardy

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function. — Walter Lippmann

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them ... It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like. — John Stuart Mill

The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism - an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat. — Fulton J. Sheen

The widespread distribution of private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it neither our free enterprise system nor our republican form of government could long endure ... The next Republican Administration will ... not only protect the cherished human right of property ownership, but will also work to help millions of Americans - particularly those from disadvantaged groups - to share in the ownership of the wealth of their nation. — Jeffrey H Reiman

And what would help minority workers are the same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth ... — Barack Obama

The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered. — Howard Zinn

Whereas our common past, out of Africa, saw a global diaspora of humankind, our common future depends on a global coming together and consensus, resulting in a more equitable distribution of the Earth's largesse. When Africa, which gave us the wealth of life, has that debt returned, the world will have come of age. — Bob Brown

The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America. — Thomas Piketty

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive. — Leland Stanford

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods. — John Cornwell

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. — Henry George

The great struggle of history has been for the control over money. It is almost tautological to affirm that to control the production and distribution of money is to control the wealth, resources, and people of the world. — Jack Weatherford

I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. — Kurt Vonnegut

Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults - its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes. — Robert B. Reich

The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit. — Sylvia Pankhurst

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Maybe today some people see opposition between, on the one hand, a seemingly barren, old, institutional church, cut off from the world, looking after buildings, and worried about membership and attendance, and on the other hand, new communities, filled with life, enthusiasm, risk, openness and welcome, concerned about the big issues of the world - injustice, torture, peace, disarmament, ecology, a better distribution of wealth, the liberation of women, drug addiction, AIDS, people with handicaps, etc ... But we know that every community, with time, risks closing in on itself and becoming an empty institution governed by laws. The new communities of today can become the closed up, barren institutions of tomorrow. — Jean Vanier

The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation
religion, education, and the distribution of wealth. — Lord Acton

The growth of equality ... calls for decisions, mechanisms and processes directed to a better distribution of wealth, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor, which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. — Pope Francis

In a world of limited resources, our wealth is at the expense of the poor. To put it simply, if we have it, others cannot. — Richard J. Foster

Diligent accumulation of personal wealth is not inherently ungodly so long as it is complemented by equally diligent distribution of personal wealth. — Kobe Bryant

Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors. — Gene Sharp

Rome was in the most dangerous inclination to change on account of the unequal distribution of wealth and property, those of highest rank and greatest spirit having impoverished themselves by shows, entertainments, ambition of offices, and sumptuous buildings, and the riches of the city having thus fallen into the hands of mean and low-born persons. So that there wanted but a slight impetus to set all in motion, it being in the power of every daring man to overturn a sickly commonwealth. — Plutarch

Yet there was this to be said for unfavorable relationships in the wealth-distribution equation. It meant the existence of a leisure class and the development of an attractive way of life which, at its best, encouraged culture and grace. As long as the other end of the scale was not too badly off, as long as the leisure classes did not entirely forget their responsibilities while enjoying their privileges, as long as their culture took no obviously unhealthy turn, there was always the tendency in Eternity to forgive the departure from the ideal wealth-distribution pattern and to search for other, less attractive maladjustments. — Isaac Asimov

Since the 1970s, analyses of the public debt have suffered from the fact that economists have probably relied too much on so-called representative agent models, that is, models in which each agent is assumed to earn the same income and to be endowed with the same amount of wealth (and thus to own the same quantity of government bonds). Such a simplification of reality can be useful at times in order to isolate logical relations that are difficult to analyze in more complex models. Yet by totally avoiding the issue of inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, these models often lead to extreme and unrealistic conclusions and are therefore a source of confusion rather than clarity. — Anonymous

Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit. — Francis Bacon

Peoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable. Nor will they perceive the distribution of wealth and resources between nations to be unalterably ordained by heaven and incapable of drastic rearrangement by the less than gentle manipulation of man. — Bob Hawke

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. — Thomas Piketty

The population is angry, frustrated, bitter - and for good reasons. For the past generation, policies have been initiated that have led to an extremely sharp concentration of wealth in a tiny sector of the population. In fact, the wealth distribution is very heavily weighted by, literally, the top tenth of one percent of the population, a fraction so small that they're not even picked up on the census. You have to do statistical analysis just to detect them. And they have benefited enormously. This is mostly from the financial sector - hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial corporations, and so on. — Noam Chomsky

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent. — Thomas Piketty

People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays ... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley]. — Charles Darwin

It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as "The Gospel of Wealth," in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At — David McCullough

We dispute the arbitrary distribution of power and wealth, which is claimed as the natural order, but which is in fact not natural at all but rather artificially created and sustained by ancient privileges. — Kate Elliott

Capital, never concerned with distribution, is now less and less concerned with production. Capital is driving for power, for the control over markets, lands, resources. Capital, in corporate hands, can move anywhere and thus demand and get the utmost in concessions and privileges as well as the freedom to operate in the interest of ever-increasing wealth and assets. — Eric Kierans

The first, or theoretic branch, that which explains the nature, production, and distribution of wealth, will be found to rest on a very few general propositions, which are the result of observation, or consciousness. — Nassau William Senior

We live in a world where there are a hell of a lot of new inputs that need to be factored in to your business. It used to be just about your employees and your customers. Now there are all the issues about global warming, about sustainability, about ethics and now about gender and the distribution of wealth. — Stuart Rose

Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear. — Ben Bernanke

The second conclusion, which is the heart of the book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence and divergence. Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently. Consider — Thomas Piketty

The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done. — Leland Stanford

Back at my teaching and editing jobs I imagined the new world we were trying to create would be enduring and absolutely better than any world we had inherited. For me, if an idea was purported to be new, it looked a lot better than any idea that seemed to be old. Most theologians I knew were trying to discover some new way of looking at the old ideas of God, humanity, sin and salvation. I was there to teach theology, but theology itself was in search of legitimation. What I was really doing might more accurately be described as promoting Rogerian psychology, wealth-distribution, demytholgy and existentialist ethics than studying God. Theology was desperately in search of a method, whether it was borrowed form cutting-edge philosophy, social theory or political life, as long as it didn't begin with revelation. — Thomas C. Oden

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past ... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment. — Henry George

In 1964 a coalition of activists, technologists, and academics delivered "The Triple Revolution", an open memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The signatories pointed out that "wealth produced by machines ... is still wealth", and used this to argue for more a equitable distribution of global profits. — China Mieville

As God loves me, when I consider this, then every modern society seems to me to be nothing but a conspiracy of the rick, who while protesting their interest in the common good pursue their own interests and stop at no trick and deception to secure their ill-gotten possessions, to pay as little as possible for the labor that produces their wealth and so force its makers to accept the nearest thing to nothing. They contrive rules for securing and assuring these tidy profits for the rich in the name of the common good, including of course the poor, and call them laws! — Thomas More

If the machinery for distribution in the present economic system of the world is incapable of properly distributing the productive wealth of nations, then that system is false and must be altered. — Gregor Strasser

In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer. — Pico Iyer

(a) Recent U.S. income growth primarily occurs at the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (b) As a result there is growing inequality. (c) And those at the bottom and in the middle are actually worse-off today than they were at the beginning of the century. (d) Inequalities in wealth are even greater than inequalities in income. (e) Inequalities are apparent not just in income but in a variety of other variables that reflect standards of living, such as insecurity and health. (f) Life is particularly harsh at the bottom - and the recession made it much worse. (g) There has been a hollowing out of the middle class. (h) There is little income mobility - the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth. (i) And America has more inequality than any other advanced industrialized country, it does less to correct these inequities, and inequality is growing more than in many other countries. — Joseph E. Stiglitz

Now let us consider theft. From the standpoint of the wealthy, this is, of course, an horrendous crime. But, laying partiality aside, let us ask ourselves as republicans: shall we, upholding the principle that all men are equal, brand as wrong an act whose effect is to accomplish a more equal distribution of wealth? Theft furthers economic equilibrium: one never hears of the rich stealing from the poor, thereby aggravating the economic imbalance; only of the poor stealing from the rich, thereby correcting it. What possibly be wrong with that? — Marquis De Sade

The United States, despite an active ideology that preaches equality, in fact has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any industrialized nation (Philips, 1988). The top one percent of the population controls over 70 percent of the wealth, and the top 5 percent control over 90 percent.9 — Dhati Lewis

Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause. — Clarence Darrow

The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice. — Roger Scruton

All legislative experiments in the way of making forcible distribution of the wealth produced in any country have failed. — Leland Stanford

In a condition of society and under an industrial organization which places labor completely at the mercy of capital, the accumulations of capital will necessarily be rapid, and an unequal distribution of wealth is at once to be observed. — Leland Stanford

All men agree that a just distribution must be according to merit in some sense; they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with freemen, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence. — Aristotle.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government. — Bruce Bartlett

the growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people think of conservatism merely as a form of complacency towards the current system of material rewards, which has nothing whatever to say about the things that 'money can't buy', or about the effect of the consumer society on our deeper values. Yet — Roger Scruton

The uneven distribution of wealth in the world is due to the uneven distribution of capitalism. — Johan Norberg

For millions of people, "wealth" amounts to little more than a few weeks' wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities. That is why it is so essential to study capital and its distribution in a methodical, systematic way. — Thomas Piketty

I think Matt Yglesias is wrong to declare that the world of 'This Town' is dying, unless he thinks publicly financed elections, strict lobbying bans and Scandinavian-style wealth distribution are imminent. — Alex Pareene

If we're going to actually come up with robots that will do our laundry or tidy up the kitchen, we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power - one that no longer contains either the super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs - to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history. — David Graeber

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies ... Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers. — Thomas C. Oden

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy. — Nassau William Senior

And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. — Martin Luther King Jr.

General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general ... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property. — Rutherford B. Hayes

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't. — Conrad Black

If our economic system is to survive, there has to be a better distribution of wealth ... we can't have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty. — Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners captured 46 percent of national income. That was the highest share that the top tenth captured for nearly eighty years, until 2007, when we returned to the wealth distribution of the country on the eve of the Great Depression. The top 1 percent did even better. Between 1979 and 2007, nearly 88 percent of the entire economy's income gains went to the top 1 percent.49 One — Christopher L. Hayes

I knew that it is out of the question to have honest, economical government while a few are inordinately rich and the great mass of men are poor. In fact, it is to be doubted if anything really worthwhile can be done until there is a fairer distribution of wealth. — Clarence Darrow

At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competition. The reform agenda reflects the same private interests that are moving to shrink public space-interests that have no desire to raise questions that might encourage students to think critically about the roots of the environmental crisis, or to examine society's unsustainable distribution of wealth and power. — Bill Bigelow

We must work together to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity and power in our society. — Nelson Mandela

The whole city was dangerous - because of chemicals and the uneven distribution of wealth and so on. — Kurt Vonnegut

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth. — Freeman Dyson

The distribution of wealth is just as important as its creation. — William Randolph Hearst

There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice. — Daniel Quinn

Modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical. As long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, then we are not even close to what is essential. — Julius Evola

They talk about class warfare
the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people? — Bernie Sanders

Because the true root cause of hunger is inequality, any method of boosting food production that deepens inequality will fail to reduce hunger. Conversely, only technologies that have positive effects on the distribution of wealth, income, and assets, that are pro-poor, can truly reduce hunger. — Miguel A. Altieri

In the United States today we have the most unequal wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth - worse than at any time since the 1920s. This is an economy that must be changed in fundamental ways. — Bernie Sanders

Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, it distribution and exchange were regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in others words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly, in the close connection between wealth and public function. — Hilaire Belloc

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government. — George Will

It is a mistake - as so many over-centralized socialist societies have discovered - to try to eliminate money as an incentive. Money is one incentive among many, and has its place. But to put no limits on the impulse to accumulate money obsessively is as destructive as to place no limits on the impulse to commit violence. A viable democratic society needs a ceiling and a floor with regard to the distribution of wealth and assets. — Philip Slater

The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income ... The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution -families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million -held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013. — Janet Yellen

Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems
competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs
result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues. — George Will

What do you mean by sound government?'
Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'
Then we haven't got sound government. — P.D. James

It comes as no surprise that average Americans have a different perception of the economy than (US President) George W. Bush and his friends. They can play around with statistics as much as they want, but it's clear that we have an unfair distribution of wealth. — Kenneth Rogoff

Anarchism ... teaches the possibility of a society in which the needs of life may be fully supplied for all, and in which the opportunities for complete development of mind and body shall be the heritage of all ... [It] teaches that the present unjust organisation of the production and distribution of wealth must finally be completely destroyed, and replaced by a system which will insure to each the liberty to work, without first seeking a master to whom he [or she] must surrender a tithe of his [or her] product, which will guarantee his liberty of access to the sources and means of production ... Out of the blindly submissive, it makes the discontented; out of the unconsciously dissatisfied, it makes the consciously dissatisfied ... Anarchism seeks to arouse the consciousness of oppression, the desire for a better society, and a sense of the necessity for unceasing warfare against capitalism and the State. — Voltairine De Cleyre

The real scientific study of the distribution of wealth has, we must confess, scarcely begun. The conventional academic study of the so-called theory of distribution into rent, interest, wages, and profits is only remotely related to the subject. This subject, the causes and cures for the actual distribution of capital and income among real persons, is one of the many now in need of our best efforts as scientific students of society. — Irving Fisher

The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential if a decent life is to be provided for every human being. — John Holdren

The distribution of wealth is not determined by nature. It is determined by policy. — Eric Schneiderman

The gratification which affluence of wealth, extent of power, and eminence of reputation confer, must be always, by their own nature, confined to a very small number; and the life of the greater part of mankind must be lost in empty wishes and painful comparisons, were not the balm of philosophy shed upon us, and our discontent at the appearances of unequal distribution soothed and appeased. — Samuel Johnson

Moving to a cooperatively organized enterprise is one of the best ways to really do something about unequal distribution of wealth. — Richard D. Wolff

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped. — Marriner Stoddard Eccles

Capitalism may be the unequal distribution of wealth, socialism is the equal distribution of poverty. — Brian K. Vaughan

If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence. — Victor Hugo