Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now. Joss Whedon
I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being – neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being. Malcolm X
I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin. Malcolm X
I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double – or triple – or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike ‘identity’, must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (gay, black, Muslim, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Philip Pullman
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic. Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards. Bertrand Russell
Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior. Socrates
As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.’ Harper Lee
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law. Aristotle
Democracy arose from men’s thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely. Aristotle
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled. Ayn Rand, Anthem
Being all equal and independent, no-one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity
In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of ‘the common people’, who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights. Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
I don’t think I could ever work in such a blatantly hierarchical corporate setting. I know that everyone in this world is not equal, but I can’t bear environments that make this truth so obvious. Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
I’m not intimidated by anyone. Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a stomach and a head. Just think about that. Josephine Baker
We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained. Derrick A Bell, Ethical Ambition
In the problem of women was the germ of a solution, not only for their oppression, but for everybody’s. The control of women in society was ingeniously effective. It was not done directly by the state. Instead the family was used – men to control women, women to control children, all to be preoccupied with one another, to turn to one another for help, to blame one another for trouble, to do violence to one another when things weren’t going right. Why could this not be turned around? Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves, men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source of their common oppression outside rather than in one another? Perhaps then they could create nuggets of strength in their own relationships, millions of pockets of insurrection. They could revolutionize thought and behavior in exactly that seclusion of family privacy which the system had counted on to do its work of control and indoctrination. And together, instead of at odds – male, female, parents, children – they could undertake the changing of society itself. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden. Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World
Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal ... There is a tendency ... for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious – because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe – some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
It’s time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin’ black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it’s getting’ to be old and young – not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually ... because there’s so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now. Jimi Hendrix
The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success). Friedrich Nietzsche
Equality lies only in human moral dignity ... Let there be brothers first, then there will be brotherhood, and only then will there be a fair sharing of goods among brothers. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Of Equality – as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself – as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
In a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it. Sally Wentworth, Summer Fire
And this hurts men. It hurts them by making them unconsciously perpetrate biases they’ve been actively taught to despise. It hurts them by making them complicit in the distress of others. It hurts them by shoehorning them into a restrictive definition masculinity from which any and all deviation is harshly punished. It hurts them by saying they will always be inferior parents and caregivers, that they must always be active and aggressive even when they long for passivity and quietude, that they must enjoy certain things like sports and beer and cars or else be deemed morally suspect. It hurts them through a process of indoctrination so subtle and pervasive that they never even knew it was happening, and when you’ve been raised to hate inequality, discovering that you’ve actually been its primary beneficiary is horrifying – like learning that the family fortune comes from blood money. Foz Meadows, blog 2012
No man [...] can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. Woodrow Wilson
The cry of equality pulls everyone down. Iris Murdoch