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Equality Quotes

Browse 1955 quotes about Equality.

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Equality Quotes

“Women need to keep asking for what they’re worth, and leaders need to make sure women are paid the same, whether they ask for it or not.”

“El caso es que no podemos saber a ciencia cierta si la mujer media es mejor persona que el hombre medio. No disponemos de esas cifras. Lo que sí sabemos, sin embargo, es que las mujeres no han impedido a los hombres estudiar, votar, trabajar como guionistas para La extraña pareja, entrar en la iglesia con pantalones, correr la maratón, participar en los Juegos Olímpicos, presentarse a unas elecciones, usar tarjetas de crédito, convertirse en astronautas, entrar en el ejército o acceder a clubs privados.”

“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

“Citizens were truly free when they could engage 'what is just and good without fear.' Liberty was therefore a positive act of will. Liberty was not an 'enemy of all authority' but 'a civil and moral' quality that made it possible for individuals, singly or in groups, to realize their potential. Tocqueville, who believed in the possibilities of human achievement, embraced the idea of liberty as capable of fostering equality. With liberty empowering individuals, equality could spread. There began the great challenge of modern history, that of balancing liberty and equality. Tocqueville kept arguing in successive formulations that the two concepts of liberty and equality, so easily at odds, actually touch and join. For one cannot be free without being equal to others; and one cannot be equal to others, in a positive sense, without being free. For Tocqueville, the combination of equality and liberty was the best possible human condition, while equality without liberty was among the worst, as he had argued in the prison report. Although Tocqueville asserted that equality and liberty ideally should be mutually reinforcing in democratic life, he recognized that men loved equality passionately but often resented the kind of demanding liberty that democracy required. It was simply too much work to set positive liberty in motion and sustain it. Indeed, Tocqueville underscored that 'nothing is harder than the apprenticeship of liberty.' As a result, Tocqueville charged, too many accept 'equality in servitude' (the result of leveling) and prefer it over the more demanding condition of 'inequality in freedom.' Only by acquiring the habit of liberty, Tocqueville argued throughout the book, could a democratic society make creative use of equality and liberty was the precondition for the dogma of popular sovereignty to 'emerge from the towns,' take possession of the government,' and become 'law of laws.”

“Racists, then, are indoctrinated citizens who think they are entitled and superior to all others, and therefore capable of committing racism and violence against them. I contend that indoctrinated individuals are prisoners to the walls built around them that keep them indoctrinated. Therefore, instead of seeing them as ‘enemies’, we need to apply the same methods of reform some thinkers have suggested to the prison system in that rather than being purely punitive, prisons should aspire to rehabilitate prisoners in such ways that they may return to society with better attitude, understanding, and healthier minds and bodies (all things lacking in racist people, if you think about it deeply). Even more important is to build a society in such a way that there would be little need to have prison systems in the first place.”

“When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?”

“It affirmed that international law was not only law 'between States' but 'also the law of mankind'. Those who transgressed it would have no immunity, even if they were leaders, a reflection of the 'outraged conscience of the world'.”

“In order for a police force to be effective, it has to earn the trust of its people. But to those who only scratch the surface, to those who do not investigate their simplistic opinions about the root cause of crime in inner cities and the animosity between police forces and communities of color, the answer is simply more policing. But what we need is different policing. Policing not steeped from root to flower in the need to control people of color.”

“Blue Blood & Blue Collar (The Sonnet) I have nothing against blue blood, any more than I'm against blue collar. But blue blood think honor is an heirloom, while blue collar earn their rightful honor. That's what I call true human character, unreliant on some fictitious identity. Every human must earn their admittance, into the civilized realm of humanity. I can still accept any blood, blue or otherwise, if they have the decency to acknowledge atrocity. Otherwise, all blue blood are canine incarnate, unworthy of acknowledgment of their existentiality. King and president, ceo and janitor, all are equal, only behavior merits honor.”

“But tradition and law are not the source of man's equality; They only acknowledge its presence as a fact of nature. The Declaration of Independence speaks of men as created equal -- created, not born; it seems likely that its authors intended to express their conviction, today verified by science, that humanity is conferred by human parents at conception. 'All men are created free and equal,' we say with those Founding Fathers.”

“The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.”

“The demands of the Young Lords could have been written today. We believed in the power of the people and in community and personal transformation. We demanded the redistribution of economic and social resources. We fought for racial justice and the equality of women. As internationalists, we condemned all political, economic, and military intervention by one nation against another. We battled proudly against exploitation, social injustice, and colonial domination. It was a call for revolution!”

“. . . and what are you exactly, my friend? Their subordinate? Their employee? Or, I would suggest, their equal? That's what young Karl would certainly have said, and probably still does. Unless he's no longer alive.' Dodger gave Solomon and strange look and Solomon hastened to clarify. "'Mmmm, as I recall, if you go around telling people that they are downtrodden, you tend to make two separate enemies: the people who are doing the downtreading and have no intention of stopping, and the people who are downtrodden, but nevertheless -- people being who they are -- don't want to know. They can get quite nasty about it.' (205)”

“You don't need to cut out the heart in your chest so other people can breathe. You just need to let them use their lungs. The right of someone to breathe does not detract from your heartbeat. We must not fear the lives that others live. Someone else going to Heaven doesn't mean you're going to Hell. Someone else going to Hell does not mean you're going to burn too. We must not fear the freedom that others have. You don't need to stop breathing so other people can keep their lungs. You just need to let them breathe. Why don't we all put a final end to the limitations that we think we are born into? They're not real. They don't exist.”

“The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of "trained skill". Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers. "The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not be reason." Thus democratic government becomes a procession of brief-lived demagogues, and men of worth are loath to enter lists where they must be judged and rated by their inferiors. Sooner or later the more capable men rebel against such a system, though they be in a minority. "Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies"; people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition men are by nature unequal; and "he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.”

“Though designing the house in which modern rational choice/utility/decision theory would inhabit, it is not clear that Ramsey would have chosen to reside there himself. For one thing, while he provided a logic of decision, he did not think that all human action and decision should be crammed into the strictures of rational choice theory, as many economists and social scientists today seem to assume. In his 1928 work in economics, he would make it clear that choosing to maximize utility is a moral decision, one which puts utility before justice and equality.”

“Without question, there have been well-intentioned movements to improve access to this “freedom” (with various degrees of success), but such efforts have largely been about carving out space within the established system. This shuffling of the deck chairs might improve conditions marginally for some but ultimately results in little more than accommodating and perpetuating the very unjust and oppressive systems without addressing the root causes (see neo-liberalism).”

“In the course of human events, if ever, injustice grabs hold of the landscape that we the people step foot on, it will be our organically divine right to abolish such injustice, with our thoughts, words and actions conscientious.”

“Mi Humanidad Insiste (The Sonnet) Mi corazón insiste that I can't sit still, Till the society is human and thus starts living. Mi corazón insiste that I can't sleep in peace, Till I bring out the peace the world holds within. Mi conciencia insiste that I can't stop walking, Till I make the fallen rise to make their destiny. Mi conciencia insiste that I can't stop working, Till each human extends a hand out in solidarity. Mi alma insiste that my breath is not my own, Till I breathe life into the souls lost in misery. Mi alma insiste that I have no right over my veins, Till the veins of society are freed from disparity. Mi humanidad insiste the life of one is the life of all. Either we are one family or nothing at all.”

“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”

“We talk about creating an utopia, but we install an empire and we build our success on the back of the exploited. We talk about equality, but we ignore the power structures that silence the voices of the less powerful. We talk about meritocracy, but we only promote and care for those from the core planets. We talk about science and rationality, but we pray to extinct gods and worship mutated humans.”

“To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?" [To the Women of India (Young India, Oct. 4, 1930)]”

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”