“We find that whereas income inequality was larger in Europe than in the United States a century ago, it is currently much larger in the United States.”

“Inequality does not follow a deterministic process. In a sense, both Marx and Kuznets were wrong. There are powerful forces pushing alternately in the direction of rising or shrinking inequality. Which one dominates depends on the institutions and policies that societies choose to adopt.”

“If there is a fixed amount of income or wealth in a society, then increases in inequality must indeed represent increases in hardship for some. But total wealth is not fixed.”

“The general concern about material inequality is a perverted form of an important and justifiable moral concern: the material suffering of the poor.”

“Our young radicals are far less dismayed at America’s failure to become what it ought to be than they are contemptuous of what it thinks it ought to be.”

“All pre-capitalist systems had been, to one degree or another, Aristotelian: they were interested in creating a high and memorable civilization even if this were shared only by a tiny minority. In contrast, capitalism lowered its sights, but offered its shares in bourgeois civilization to the entire citizenry.”

“My reading of history is that, in the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”