Quotes about equality

By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.

— St. Thomas Aquinas

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

— Aristotle

Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.

— Aristotle

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

— Aristotle

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

— Honore De Balzac

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

— Simone De Beauvoir

There has to be positive action that allows the most disadvantaged people to get their fair share of job opportunities.

— Paul Burton

Equal opportunity is good, but special privilege is better.

— Anna Chennault

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

— James F. Cooper

She was not a women likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.

— Anthony Delano

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

— William J. Durant

A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

— Andrea Dworkin

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

— Bob Dylan

The mandate for equal opportunity doesn't dictate disregard for the differences in candidates' qualities and skills. There is no constitutional right to play ball. All there is a right to compete for it on equal terms.

— Tim III Ellis

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

— Frantz Fanon

We've chosen the path to equality, don't let them turn us around.

— Geraldine Ferraro

Generally, employees who file complaints of discrimination do so as a last resort.

— Rubye Fields

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

— Erich Fromm

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay.

— Linda Grant

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

— Aldous Huxley

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

— Thomas Jefferson

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

— Samuel Johnson

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

— Samuel Johnson

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

— Samuel Johnson

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal

— King Jr. Martin Luther

The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.

— D. H. Lawrence

The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.

— Wyndham Lewis

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.

— Martin Luther

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

— Herbert Marcuse

The doctrine of equality! There exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

— George Orwell

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.

— Camille Paglia

Six feet of earth make all men equal.

— Proverb

You cannot have all chiefs; you gotta have Indians too.

— American Proverb

Perfect love cannot be without equality.

— Scottish Proverb

A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing.

— Spanish Proverb

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as unqualified as some of the men who are already there.

— Maureen Reagan

No man is above the law, and no man is below it.

— Theodore Roosevelt

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

— Bertrand Russell

Equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to prove unequal talents.

— Viscount Samuel

What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.

— Phyllis Schlafly

We were equals once when we lay new-born babes on our nurse's knees. We will be equal again when they tie up our jaws for the last sleep.

— Olive Schreiner

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

— George Bernard Shaw

The battle for women's rights has been largely won.

— Margaret Thatcher

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

We are all alike, on the inside.

— Mark Twain

All people are equal, it is not birth, it is virtue alone that makes the difference.

— Voltaire

Modern equalitarian societies whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier. Happiness thus becomes the chief political issue -- in a sense, the only political issue -- and for that reason it can never be treated as an issue at all.

— Robert Warshow

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

— Simone Weil

If you really believe that all men are created equal, you are comfortable in any company.

— Michael Lipsey

Value equal benefits received for burdens endured

— Leonard J. Berry

They say the birds out number the people so everyday i am trying to make it equal.

— BPBEE

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

— Honore De Balzac

Observe the life by cause and consequence. Explore the life by wisdom. Treat the life by equality. Complete the life by love.

— Buddha