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Equality Quotes

Browse 1955 quotes about Equality.

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Equality Quotes

“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] 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.”

“Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could managed the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar? Sometimes I think that I am. The beggar knows much that the king can only guess. And yet who draws up the codes for begging ordinances? Often I wonder what my experience in life--my easy life following the Desolation, and my current level of comfort--has given me of any true experience to use in making laws. If we had to rely on what we knew, kings would only be of use in creating laws regarding the proper heating of tea and the cushioning of thrones.”

“We liberals and progressives need to do a better job at verbalizing what we are for, and not just what we are against. If we want a public option, we must make the case for it. Every time the Republicans start talking about the corruption, waste, and negligence of “Big Government,” we should talk about those same qualities in Big Corporations. If we want to end factory farming, decrease income inequality, and end discrimination in all its insidious forms, we must fight for those things and so much more. It is a subtle but important difference to stand for equality rather than to merely stand against inequality, and I believe that within this positive framework, more transformative arguments can be made.”

“Giants in Jeans Sonnet 22 If the world is messed up, We may not be the cause of it. But if we die leaving it the same, We are nothing but bags of wind. Society wasn't built on equity, Nor was it built on principles of justice. All was founded on exploitation of the lowly, And some modern apes still can't get over it. Till today the rich talk about equality, While flying in their private jets. Things get even more hypocritical and wacky, When they talk about climate change. However, we can still make this world better, We just have to actually start living simpler.”

“The only people you have to look out for in life are the people that don't care about anything or anyone. These are the people that end up teaching your children.”

“How I Get My Ideas (The Sonnet) You wanted to know how I get my ideas, The universe speaks to me. You wanted to know how my words appear, The soil and the air hand them to me. You asked how do I speak for every culture, I listen to the heart beyond the word. You asked how am I not bound by geography, Long ago I turned my inner walls into dust. You said to me that I should have some fun, I'll indeed have fun when the fallen are lifted. You wanted to know why do I care at all, That's because I am an alive human not an insect. Instead of asking why and how a human acts human, If there is no such being around why not be the first one!”

“We’re all Malkuthians. And you know what? We’re all Theropods too.” “Wh-wh-what’s that?” “You know… Theropods. We’ve all got sharp teeth, we all walk on two legs, we all have arms shorter than our legs. For the most part, we’ve got two eyes, two hands, and a tail. I mean, some of us have more fingers and some of us have a horn or two, but how different does that really make us? We’re all just people, that’s what I’m saying. There shouldn’t be all this division and categorization. It just leads to more hate. It leads to more dysfunction. People look at me and think I’m privileged. People look at you and think you’re untouchable. They look at the two of us together and they think it’s fire and ice. It’s not right.”

“From the moment when the bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, alongside it appeared the proletarian demand for the abolition of the classes themselves. [...] The proletarians took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must also be extended to the social, economic sphere. [...] Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity.”

“Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash. This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.”

“When in the course of my work at the luminar, I was reviewing public law, from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond, I thought of an Anglo Saxon's axiom about human equality. He seeks it not in the ever-changing distribution of power and means, but in a constant: the fact that anyone can kill anyone else. This is a platitude, albeit reduced to a striking formula. The possibility of killing someone else is part of the potential of the anarch whom everyone carries around inside himself, even though he is seldom aware of that possibility. It always slumbers in the underground, even when two people exchange greetings in the street or avoid each other. When one stands atop a tower or in front of an oncoming train, that possibility is already drawing closer. Aside from the technological dangers, we also register the nearness of the Other. He can even be my brother. An old poet, Edgar Allen Poe, grasped this possibility in ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’. In any case, we watch our backs. Then comes the thronging in the catastrophe, the raft of the Méduse, the starving in the lifeboat. I want to indicate this only insofar as it concerns my service. In any event, I brought this knowledge into the Condor’s range, into the inner sanctum that Monseigneur described as his ‘Parvulo.’ I can kill him, dramatically or discreetly. His beverages – he especially likes a light red wine – ultimately pass through my hands. Now granted, it is unlikely that I would kill him, albeit not impossible. Who can tell what astrological conjunctions one may get involved in? So, for now, my knowledge is merely theoretical, though important insofar as it puts me in his level. Not only can I kill him; I can also grant him amnesty. This is in my hands. Naturally, I would not try to strike him just because he is tyrant – I am too well versed in history, especially the model that we have attained in Eumeswil. An immoderate tyrant settles his own hash. The execution can be left to the anarchists; that is all they think about.”

“...most Americans have internalized the espoused cultural values of fairness and justice for all at the same time that they have been breathing the smog of racial biases and stereotypes pervading popular culture...[it leaves] many Whites feeling uneasy, uncomfortable, and even perhaps fearful in the presence of Black people, often without their conscious awareness of these feelings.”

“How can we ensure that these dead would not have died in vain? And how can we make sure that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth? I don’t know about you, but personally, I think it's by being devoted to the same cause to which they gave their last full measure of devotion- by being dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

“Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.”

“I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her - I cannot say what would frighten them most - her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or a girl.”

“Your water is in the bottles, and my water is in the bucket, but we are brothers? I am collecting garbage, and you are in the bed, but we are sisters? My fingers are broken, and your hands are so soft, but we are family? Your God is like an angel, and my God is like an evil, but we are equal? My stomach is empty, and your stomach is so big, but we are humans?”

“Our way would seem quite familiar to the Romans, more by far than the Greek way. Socrates in the Symposium, when Alcibiades challenged him to drink two quarts of wine, could have done so or not as he chose, but the diners-out of Horace's day had no such freedom. He speaks often of the master of the drinking, who was always appointed to dictate how much each man was to drink. Very many unseemly dinner parties must have paved the way for that regulation. A Roman in his cups would've been hard to handle, surly, quarrelsome, dangerous. No doubt there had been banquets without number which had ended in fights, broken furniture, injuries, deaths. Pass a law then, the invariable Roman remedy, to keep drunkenness within bounds. Of course it worked both ways: everybody was obliged to empty the same number of glasses and the temperate man had to drink a great deal more than he wanted, but whenever laws are brought in to regulate the majority who have not abused their liberty for the sake of the minority who have, just such results come to pass. Indeed, any attempt to establish a uniform average in that stubbornly individual phenomenon, human nature, will have only one result that can be foretold with certainty: it will press hardest on the best.”

“Equality in America has never meant literal equality of condition or capacity. There will always be inequalities in character and ability in any society. Equality has meant rather that in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." It is meant that in a democratic society there should be no inequalities in opportunities or in freedoms.”

“The claimed legitimizing devices of political consent or personal labour served only to obscure the unjustifiable seizure of land from the common by the powerful. Other commoners at the time of those seizures had not consented to them, and even if they had done so, their consent could not bind later generations.”

“Still, in 1877, Engels wanted to protect us from false socialism. Still then, in Anti-Dühring, he wrote that not any nationalization is socialist, because in the contrary case both Bismarck and Napoleon would have to be arranged among the founders of socialism.”

“The prostitution of the male body in fashion puts an end to the last heroic privilege of woman - that of being sacrificed to the gaze while concealing herself, precisely thereby, in a second nudity. A fantastic advance by women on the path to total parity: no limits to sexual equality any longer. You can see this too in the picture of the young American woman turned torturer in the jails of Iraq, holding the naked or hooded Arab on a leash, as in some Western, women-only club. Advancement is irresistible. It happens for better and for worse.”

“everything in our culture tells men and boys to avoid any interest, activity or community dominated by women - and when article after article insists that boys are reading less than girls; when the pop cultural discourse shies away from portraying boys as readers, or closely associates male reading with male unpopularity and outcastness; when the humanities is widely touted as being the feminine alternative to the masculine sciences; when finally, after centuries of exclusion, girls are actually getting a break at something, the consequence is that boys are keeping away in droves. [...]Having been raised to exclude girls from manly pursuits, boys are also reluctant to pursue female ones. If that means reading – and in some cases, sadly, it does, reading and other sedentary or indoor hobbies being viewed as the antithesis of sports, and therefore by extension the enemy of all things masculine – then writing more boy-centric books won’t help. (Unless, of course, your ultimate long-term plan is to take reading away from girls and return it to boys, in which case, you fail everything.) If, on the other hand, you want boys and girls to be reading with equal passion and in equal numbers, then a very clear alternative presents itself: teach your boys that there’s nothing wrong with girls, or girl things, period. Take away the stigma, and let everyone read without judgement. Stories are genderless, no matter who writes or stars in them. And if we can’t bear to teach our teenagers that, then we need to seriously rethink our sstatus as an equal and fair society.”

“Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere alikuwa baba kwa familia yake. Kwa Tanzania alikuwa mlezi; wa ndoto ya haki, amani, uzalendo, ujamaa, na uhuru.”

“Urging an organization to be inclusive is not an attack. It's progress.”

“To every guy who tries to say that we have already achieved equality for the sexes, if this were true, you wouldn't be told to "man up", "be a man", "stop being a p*#%y", "harden the fuck up", "toughen up", "boys don't cry", "don't be such a girl", "stop being a wimp". As long as this type of language still exists in our society, then gender equality, my friends, has in fact not been achieved after all.”

“For me, the nomination of Barack Obama as a candidate for president and his inauguration in Washington represents a brief glimpse at the power and potential of peace. There was a radiance about America then, a great coming together of so many people, races, generations, and beliefs. For one brief moment in our history, we found a way to put down our strife against one another. For a few days, weeks, and months all the false reasons we use daily to look down on others, to separate ourselves from one another, fell away, and we opened our hearts to the kind of equality that our founders envisioned but did not have the courage to create. In that moment we decided to face the truth of our oneness with one another, and when we did we experienced the beauty of peace.”