Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax government transfer payments have become less progressive.

— Paul Ryan

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

— Friedrich August von Hayek

I'm not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class.

— Nicholas A. Christakis

Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.

— Mary Douglas

It's well proven that if you have equality in society, society flourishes, and if you have inequality, it doesn't. So it's good for everybody.

— Sarah Gavron

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

— Chrystia Freeland

The equality among all members of the League, which is provided in the statutes giving each state only one vote, cannot of course abolish the actual material inequality of the powers concerned.

— Hjalmar Branting

The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.

— Thomas Piketty

There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.

— John F. Kennedy

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

— Aristotle