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Equality Quotes

Browse 1955 quotes about Equality.

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Equality Quotes

“In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.”

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer, and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

“Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason." (In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth)”

“Little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the physiological aspect, too -- to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water --”

“Also, this formulation ‘the great man’ of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infection disease? So that we have been battling microparasites and macroparasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?”

“In her every small movement she was the woman of the future, a type that would swagger and curse, fall headlong, flaming into the hell of war, be as brave and tough as men, take the overflowing diarrhea of nervous frontline troops without grimacing, speak loudly and devastatingly, kick brain matter off their shoes and go unhurriedly on. When he looked at Bern, Viktor saw the future, and it was lovely and clean and as equal as things between men and women, between prole and patrician, could be.”

“It was the USSR, as an emerging basketball power in the 1950s, that first called on Olympic leaders to officially add women's basketball to the program as a medal sport, a half century after the Fort Shaw girls demonstrated the game in St. Louis. Their first attempt came during a June 1955 meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Paris, where the Soviets asked delegates to vote on the adding women's competitions in volleyball, basketball, speed skating, and rowing, all of which were already open to male athletes.”

“Let's think a little about why, after so many centuries, never ahs a good tragedy, a good poem, a respected history, a good painting, a good book on physical science come from the hands of women? Why should these creatures, whose understanding seems so completely similar to men, seem however to be kept behind the barrier by an invincible power? Tell me if you can.”

“[I]n most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work—they'll set the fires that burn down the forest on which they plant their fields, for example, and, if they can, relegate to women the more monotonous and time-consuming tasks, such as weeding. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.”

“Identifying as a woman of colour has been crucial in my understanding of structural politics in society. But this focus hasn't changed the plantation structure, the violence against black bodies and women's bodies. When we stake our primary claim on a racial identity, that identity can be used against us, to keep us in our category, to keep us divided. When we are so divided, it appears that it is impossible to address inequality, because it looks as though we're calling for "sameness" not equality. Which is, of course, not what we want at all.”

“A woman is not a toy or a plaything. A woman is a friend, companion, and support of a man. A woman is an equal of a man. A woman shows a man what love and care is all about. A woman makes a house into a home. A woman bears children and carries forward the hope of past generation to the future generation. A woman has dreams and hopes of her own. If you consider yourself a man then you must love and support the women you meet in your life, but don't ever try to take advantage of them, or to bring them down.”

“¡Oh tú, mujer! que pudiendo sembrar justicia estás dispuesta á hacerlo; no te turbes, ni te inquietes, ni huyas, adelante! y en provecho de las futuras gereraciones coloca la primera piedra para el edificio de la igualdad social de un modo firme y sereno, con todo el derecho que te pertenece, sin bajar la frente, que ya no eres la antigua material é intelectual esclava. Tu iniciativa será coronada por el éxito, haciéndose por tu propio esfuerzo tu alına, luminosa y bella como un sol de verdad y justicia.”

“An egalitarian society can only hope to achieve its goals by totalitarian methods of coercion; and, even here, we all believe and hope the human spirit of individual man will rise up and thwart any such attempts to achieve an ant-heap world. In short, the portrayal of an egalitarian society is horror fiction because, when the implications of such a world are fully spelled out, we recognize that such a world and such attempts are profoundly antihuman; being antihuman in the deepest sense, the egalitarian goal is, therefore, evil and any attempts in the direction of such a goal must be considered evil as well.”

“We believe some people are more special, more beautiful, more capable, more influential, more intelligent, more gifted, and have a greater capacity for good than others, often based on material possessions and outer appearances. At the root, that is why we are engaged in a struggle now in the Congress led by one group of people who truly believes their role is to defend the privileges of the elite. They defend tax breaks for the rich and ask for trillions in cuts to the safety nets that protect the middle class, the elderly, the sick, and the poor, because, in essence, they believe one group is more important than the other, more deserving than the other, and one contributes more good than the other. This is actually an illusion that is blind to the interdependence of the entire creation, which unites the weak with the strong, the privileged with the poor, and the ugly with the beautiful. All the inequities of our world are basically attempts to actualize this erroneous belief. And that is why there is turmoil, because we are in conflict with the truth, working to manifest an idea that is false.”

“The goodness of a person is normally judged based upon how they act towards those whom they consider to be less fortunate than themselves. This has become the standard for measuring the goodness of a person. But this is erroneous. It is in fact very easy to be good to those whom you consider to be less fortunate than yourself. You know what's difficult? Being good to those you envy! That is what's difficult to do! People believe themselves to practice equality because they are good to those who are lesser than they are, but this is not equality if they do not show the same amount of goodness to the people who happen to be more than they are. I always look at how a person treats those who are more than they are, and that is how I determine the goodness in a person. Because the other option is just too easy. The other option comes with all benefit and no loss.”

“As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'—that he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous words one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions. Every time you hear a piece of psychobabble or propaganda—'people's princess,' say, or 'collateral damage,' or 'peace initiative'—it is good to have a well-thumbed collection of his essays nearby. His main enemy in discourse was euphemism, just as his main enemy in practice was the abuse of power, and (more important) the slavish willingness of people to submit to it.”