Quotes to Think About:

"The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues -- not faction, but rather distraction -- there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth."
-- Plato, Greek Philosopher

"In our world of 6 billion people, one billion own 80 percent of global GDP, while another billion struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day. This is a world out of balance.”
-- James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank

"What we have here is a form of looting... The rich don't need the money and are a lot less likely to spend it - they will primarily increase their savings. Remember that wealthier families have done extremely well in the US in the past twenty years, whereas poorer ones have done quite badly. So the redistributive effects of this administration's tax policy are going in the exactly wrong direction..."
--George A. Akerlof, 2001 Nobel laureate in Economics

"There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to male the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests above them."
-- William Jennings Bryan, 1896

" An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
-- Plutarch

"The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied." 
-- Lucretius

"There are only two families in the world, as my grandmother used to say: the haves and the have-nots." 
-- Sancho Panza in Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha

"Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another."
-- Plato, The Republic

"The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government." 
-- Theodore Roosevelt

"We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." 
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

"The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes." 
-- John Maynard Keynes, English Economist

"Americans (or at least the top few percent of the income distribution) have gotten into a sort of arms race of conspicuous consumption that, like most arms races, consumes huge quantities of resources, yet in the end changes little." 
-- Paul Krugman, Economist

"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kids of soil." 
-- Warren Buffet

"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services..."
-- Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General Assembly

"I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on." 
-- Thomas Jefferson 

"It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the devil work hard." 
-- Henry David Thoreau