Equality Quotes

1. "Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit."
Author: Alveda King

2. "Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down."
Author: Amanda Ripley

3. "I am fiscally prudent and socially progressive. I believe in protecting a woman's right to choose. I believe in marriage equality."
Author: Andrew Cuomo

4. "The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal."
Author: Aristotle

5. "[A]lthough the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing."
Author: Barack Obama

6. "No one is born with equality. We all come here with varying degrees of opportunities, qualities, strengths, weaknesses, IQ, etc."
Author: Brandi L. Bates

7. "From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own."
Author: Carl Schurz

8. "Like other women who sought equality, the amount of trouble I cause is inversely proportional to my physical size."
Author: Cassandra Duffy

9. "The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality."
Author: Charles Baudelaire

10. "A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness."
Author: Christina Hoff Sommers

11. "If we say we believe in equality for all then we must fight for equality for all, not betray our immigrant sisters."
Author: Christine Pelosi

12. "At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal"
Author: Christopher L. Hayes

13. "The feminist challenge was sweeping: it embraced education andoccupation, together with legal, political, and social status. It evendared broach the subject of equality in personal, and especiallymatrimonial, relationships. Such assertiveness was more unsettlingthan the racial threat because it was more intimate and immediate:few white men lived with blacks, but most lived with women."
Author: Cynthia Russett

14. "In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question."
Author: David Korten

15. "The world was in terrible shape, and I'm glad we stood up and said what we believed; but a lot of the time we'd say these beautiful things about justice and fairness and equality, but we weren't so nice to each other. We'd be jealous and we'd gossip, and we'd be moody and difficult and rude and inconsiderate. Why do I say 'we'? I mean I would be all that-- and if at the time I ever came near to knowing what I'd become, I'd dodge, I'd duck, I'd go on the offensive: the terrible Wall Street bankers. Lots of them were terrible-- and so were lots of us."
Author: Dorothy Day

16. "Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men?"
Author: Dorothy Thompson

17. "Here are the values that I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values."
Author: Ellen DeGeneres

18. "On the one hand we publicly pronounce the equality of all peoples; on the other hand, in our immigration laws, we embrace in practice these very theories we abhor and verbally condemn."
Author: Emanuel Celler

19. "Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves."
Author: Emile Durkheim

20. "The egalitarian mania of demagogues is even more dangerous than the brutality of men in gallooned coats. For the anarch, this remains theoretical, because he avoids both sides. Anyone who has been oppressed can get back on his feet if the oppression has not cost him his life. A man who has been equalized is physically and morally ruined. Anyone who is different is not equal; that is one of the reasons why the Jews are so often targeted. Equalization goes downward, like shaving, hedge trimming, or the pecking order of poultry. At times, the world spirit seems to change into monstrous Procrustes – a man has read Rousseau and starts practicing equality by chopping off heads or, as Mimie le Bon called it, 'making the apricots roll.' The guillotinings in Cambrai were an entertainment before dinner. Pygmies shortened the legs of tall Africans in order to cut them down to size; white Negroes flatten the literary languages."
Author: Ernst Jünger

21. "Fairness is a myth among a fallen humankind, but equality of struggle can be maintained, even if it is only a pale ghost of true fairness."
Author: G. Norman Lippert

22. "It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

23. "Forty-two years after Dr. King was murdered, we are still a nation of inequality. People of color, women, gays, lesbians, and others are still treated as second-class citizens. Yes, things have changed but we have still not achieved equality among all humans. And nonhuman animals continue to be chattel property without any inherent value."
Author: Gary L. Francione

24. "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?"
Author: Harold Edmund Stearns

25. "Any serious shift towards more sustainable societies has to include gender equality."
Author: Helen Clark

26. "Surely, if it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish," it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic."
Author: Howard Zinn

27. "I think it's a very central tenet to it yes, it is. I can't bear it, I can't bear inequality, I can't bear bad behaviour to other people. I cannot bear it that people are mean to people who can't help what they are."
Author: Janet Suzman

28. "Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."
Author: Jean Paul Marat

29. "As a broad generalization, liberals see income as a public good that is distributed, like crayons in a kindergarten class. If so-and-so didn't get his or her fair share of income, it's because someone or something — government, the system — didn't distribute income properly. To the extent conservatives see income inequality as a problem, it is as an indication of more concrete problems. If the poor and middle class are falling behind the wealthy, it might be a sign of declining or stagnating wages or lackluster job creation. In other words, liberals tend to see income inequality as the disease, and conservatives tend to see it as a symptom."
Author: Jonah Goldberg

30. "I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts."
Author: Jonathan Haidt

31. "I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality."
Author: Judith Butler

32. "Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes."
Author: Kahlil Gibran

33. "There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work."
Author: Ken Livingstone

34. "We can say all we want about equality, but we don't believe in it. We believe in superiority and inferiority. It's in our nature to rank ourselves into status groups."
Author: Lauren McLaughlin

35. "Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination."
Author: Mary Douglas

36. "In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality."
Author: Mary McCarthy

37. "The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive."
Author: Melissa V. Harris Perry

38. "You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil."
Author: Muhammad Ali Jinnah

39. "To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women."
Author: Naomi Wolf

40. "If a man looks upon any other man and estimates that man as less than himself, then he is stealing from the other. He is stealing the other's birthright - that of equality."
Author: Neville Goddard

41. "From a viable economy to the full funding of Headstart, from a clean environment to true equality for women, from a strong military to a commitment to racial brotherhood, from schools that are honored to streets free of excessive violence."
Author: Paul Tsongas

42. "The sole equality on earth is death."
Author: Philip James Bailey

43. "The kind of emancipation that is being put forward today in technologically based cultures is crying out for women at last to become men. But this is not equality of rights: it is the ultimate oppression of women by a civilization in which the hegemony of technology implies the subjugation of nature and the subjugation of women -- the two are closely inter-related."
Author: Pope Benedict XVI

44. "Women have talent and intelligence but, due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality."
Author: Pratibha Patil

45. "I happen to agree with many of the liberal emphasis on compassion, justice and equality. I just disagree that it's the government's role to provide everything."
Author: Rick Warren

46. "I said on the equality side of it, that it is essential to a woman's equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling."
Author: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

47. "The more women help one another, the more we help ourselves. Acting like a coalition truly does produce results. Any coalition of support must also include men, many of whom care about gender inequality as much as women do."
Author: Sheryl Sandberg

48. "In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there. We have 300 million poor in India."
Author: Sri Mulyani Indrawati

49. "Here's the progression. Feminism won; you can have it all; of course you want children; mothers are better at raising children than fathers; of course your children come first; of course you come last; today's children need constant attention, cultivation, and adoration, or they'll become failures and hate you forever; you don't want to fail at that; it's easier for mothers to abandon their work and their dreams than for fathers; you don't want it all anymore (which is good because you can't have it all); who cares about equality, you're too tired; and whoops--here we are in 1954."
Author: Susan Douglas

50. "Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."
Author: Will Durant

Equality Quotes Pictures