equality Quotes

“The gradual development of the equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.”

″‘Señor, does it not bother you that some of your compadres live better than others?’ yelled one of Marta’s friends. ‘We are going to strike in two weeks. At the peak of the cotton. For higher wages and better housing!‘”

“America, then, exhibits in her social state a most extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.”

“It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.”

“The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.”

“Men who live in ages of equality have a great deal of curiosity and very little leisure; their life is so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that but little time remains to them for thought.”

“For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”

“It is possible to conceive men arrived at a degree of freedom which should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. But men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented.”

“If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

“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…”

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”

“Have no friends not equal to yourself.”

“So what if people look more alike now? It’s the only way to make people equal.”

“If only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat everyone the same even if they looked different.”

“If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.”

“Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father’s secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn’t know they were there.”

“I married your daddy and settled down to cooking his supper and keeping clean sheets on the bed. When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. . . . But at that time I wanted that.”

“Ezinma did not call her mother Nne like all children. She called her by her name, Ekwefi, as her father and other grown-up people did. The relationship between them was not only that of mother and child. There was something in it like the companionship of equals, which was strengthened by such little conspiracies as eating eggs in the bedroom.”

“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution...”

“No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

“The promise of equality is not the same as true equality.”

“The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don’t expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don’t.”

“As women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home.”

“The same blood runs in every human on the earth. You just have to see past the variations in skin and culture.”

“History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. ”

“We’re all created equal, but we don’t all end up equal.”

“All men are free and equal, in the grave.”

“The day they decided that Sneetches were Sneetches. And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.”

“Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.”

“Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.”

“Then they yelled at the ones that had stars at the start. We’re exactly like you! You can’t tell us apart. We’re all just the same, now, you snooty old smarties! And now we can go to your frankfurter parties.”

“That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars, and whether they had one, or not, upon thars.”

“It is something, Cassie. White is something just like black is something. Everybody born on this earth is something and nobody, no matter what color, is better than anybody else.”

“As long as he was in the city, Planchet kept at the respectful distance he had imposed upon himself; but as soon as the road began to be more lonely and dark, he drew softly nearer, so that when they entered the Bois de Boulogne he found himself riding quite naturally side by side with his master.”

“Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them, when they come into the world, and for some time after; but it is but a temporary one.”

“It wasn’t northern agitators who pushed Negroes to question their country, as so many southern whites wanted to believe. It was their own pride, their patriotism, their deep and abiding belief in the possibility of democracy that inspired the Negro people. And why not? Who knew American democracy more intimately than the Negro people? They knew democracy’s every virtue, vice, and shortcoming, its voice and contour, by its profound and persistent absence in their lives. The failure to secure the blessings of democracy was the feature that most defined their existence in America. Every Sunday they made their way to their sanctuaries and fervently prayed to the Lord to send them a sign that democracy would come to them.”

“What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.”

“The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.”

“As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.”

“Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.”

“Each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.”

“Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede.”

“Tell them, that the Being we all worship, under different names, will be mindful of their charity; and that the time shall not be distant, when we may assemble around his throne, without distinction of sex, or rank, or color!”

The Seven Commandments: Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

“For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve SOME decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. ”

“The way I see it, critics get to say what they want to about my work, so why shouldn’t I be able to say what I want to about theirs?”

“My passion is equal to the task.”

“Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”

“Like and equal are not the same thing at all!”

“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”

“Men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.”

“Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.”

″...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”

“Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.”

“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”

“I would like to see you. But: I would only like to see you with your feeling space, and desire, the parents of bravery, and curiosity. I would like you to want to see me without you feeling seduced or pressured. I would like to see you without our playing games: for games are for winners and losers and I do not ever want to win against you, or for you to lose against me, and I do not want to lose against you or for you to win against me. For we are part of the whole, the main, as Donne said—and your gain is mine and my loss is yours. Love is about finding one’s match, which means we shall touch our minds and hearts together at once, and never condescend or aim for any goal between us but the truth.”

“When I was drunk and Lydia was insane we were nearly an equal match.”

“Justice therefore demands that no one should do more ruling than being ruled, but that all should have their turn.”

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.‘”

“This sweltering summer of the colored people’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”

“In Aramanth, every man and woman is born equal, and has an equal chance to rise to the very highest position. There is no poverty here, or crime, or war. We have no need of prophets.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.”

“Now is the time to make justice a reality to all of God’s children.”

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Due to their biological structure, these people had managed the impossible. They were actually living in a world of peace and utopian equality, where everybody was happy to be parts of greater, united wholes.”

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.”

“Women ought to be free—as free as we are.”

“It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same?”

“For we are leaders of inclusiveness and community, of love, equity, and justice.”

“Part of the problem is that we tend to think that equality is about treating everyone the same, when it’s not. It’s about fairness. It’s about equity of access.”

“We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.”

“Though some people may see themselves as better or more important than others, in God’s eyes we are all equal, and it’s what is in our hearts that matters.”