Wealth & Money Quote by Nina Simone

Nina Simone doesn’t dress this up as hope because she’s not selling uplift; she’s sounding an alarm. The first sentence lands like a blunt economic diagnosis: inequality isn’t an abstract imbalance, it’s an overstuffed side and an empty one, a society structurally designed to hoard and starve. “Too rich” and “too poor” is deliberately plain language, the kind that refuses policy euphemisms. It’s the voice of someone who’s watched the country congratulate itself on progress while keeping the same ledger.

Then she turns that ledger into a moral threat: Black survival itself. Her line about Black people not “rising” isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a rejection of the civil rights era’s favorite narrative arc, the idea that endurance naturally cashes out as victory. Simone is pointing at the costs of “waiting” - not just incarceration and poverty, but stress, premature death, violence, addiction, the slow grind of being treated as disposable. “Most of them are going to die” is hyperbole with a purpose: it forces the listener to hear racism not as prejudice but as a death-dealing system.

Context matters: Simone was an artist radicalized by Medgar Evers’ assassination and the Birmingham church bombing, a performer who turned stages into platforms and paid for it with surveillance, blacklisting pressures, and exile. The intent is confrontational clarity. She’s using the authority of her fame to say what polite society would rather keep muffled: inequality is not just unfair; it’s fatal.