QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON
The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate.
Cecil F. Alexander (1818-1895, Poet and hymnist)
By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Equality is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975, German-born American political philosopher)
Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.
Aristotle (BC 384-322, Greek philosopher)
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 (BC 384-322, Greek philosopher)
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Aristotle (BC 384-322, Greek philosopher)
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
John Ball (1869-1381, British priest, social agitator)
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
Honore De Balzac (1799-1850, French novelist)
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
Simone De Beauvoir (1908-1986, French novelist, essayist)
There has to be positive action that allows the most disadvantaged people to get their fair share of job opportunities.
Paul Burton (British expert in urban studies)
My grandma (rest her soul) used to say, "There were but two families in the world, have-much and have-little."
Miguel De Cervantes (1547-1616, Spanish novelist, dramatist, poet)
We accept and welcome... as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919, American industrialist, philanthropist)
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 (1789-1851, American novelist)
The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.
James F. Cooper (1789-1851, American novelist)
Equality is what does not exist among mortals.
EE Cummings (1894-1962, American poet)
She was not a women likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.
Anthony Delano
Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
William J. Durant (1885-1981, American historian, essayist)
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 (1946-, American feminist critic)
All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
Bob Dylan (1941-, American musician, singer, songwriter)
All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
Bob Dylan (1941-, American musician, singer, songwriter)
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 (American district court judge)
Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
No amount of artificial reinforcement can offset the natural inequalities of human individuals.
Henry P. Fairchild (1904-, American sociologist)
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 (1914-, American president of Blacks in Government)
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 (1900-1980, American psychologist)
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 (British journalist)
The only inequalities that matter begin in the mind. It is not income levels but differences in mental equipment that keep people apart, breed feelings of inferiority.
Jacquetta Hawkes
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935, American judge)
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
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 (1743-1826, American President (3rd))
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 (1709-1784, British author)
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 (1709-1784, British author)
Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
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.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968, American Civil Rights leader, Nobel Prize winner, 1964)
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)
People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community.
Leo XIII (1810-1903, Pope from 1878 to 1903)
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 (1882-1957, British author, painter)
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 (1936-, Latin American author)
An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.
Martin Luther (1483-1546, German leader of the protestant reformation)
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 (1898-1979, German political philosopher)
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 (1844-1900, German philosopher)
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 (1947-, American author, critic, educator)
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell (1903-1950, British author, "Animal Farm")
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
George Orwell (1903-1950, British author, "Animal Farm")
You cannot have all chiefs; you gotta have Indians too.
American Proverb (Sayings of American origin)
Perfect love cannot be without equality.
Scottish Proverb (Sayings of Scottish origin)
A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing.
Spanish Proverb (Sayings of Spanish origin)
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
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law...
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962, American First Lady, columnist, lecturer, humanitarian)
Everyone, without any discrimination, ha, the right to equal pay for equal work...
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962, American First Lady, columnist, lecturer, humanitarian)
No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919, American President (26th))
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 (1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, essayist)
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 (1924-, American author and political activist)
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 (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
There is no good in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else. The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.
William M. Thackeray (1811-1863, Indian-born British novelist)
The battle for women's rights has been largely won.
Margaret Thatcher (1925-, British Prime Minister (1979-90))
The rich and the poor are alike before the Lord who made them all.
The Holy Bible (Sacred scriptures of Christians and Judaism)
Source: Proverbs 22:2
However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.
Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859, French social philosopher)
The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.
Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859, French social philosopher)
We are all alike, on the inside.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
Six feet of earth make all men equal.
Author Unknown
All people are equal, it is not birth, it is virtue alone that makes the difference.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778, French historian, writer)
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 (1910-1943, French philosopher, mystic)
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