In the 1960s we were fighting to be recognized as equals in the marketplace, in marriage, in education and on the playing field. It was a very exciting, rebellious time. Marlo Thomas
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. Thomas Paine
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother. Thomas Huxley
You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that. Arthur Ashe
We want to be brothers and sisters. We want respect and equality. Simon Bolivar, our father, said a balanced world – a universe – a balanced universe in order to have peace and development. Hugo Chavez
My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity ... that’s the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren’t given equality of opportunity. Zadie Smith
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. Mary McCarthy
Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal. Jeane Kirkpatrick
In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
However distinguished by rank or property, in the rights of freedom we are all equal. Junius, cited Public Advertiser 19th March 1770
The reason Lilith was rejected as Adam’s wife was because she insisted on equality. Rabbi David Wolpe, Sinai Temple, Los Angeles
What made in particular male religious leaders so uncomfortable about Lilith was that she was associated with seduction; and also she was associated with full equality. Rabbi David Wolpe
Taxes go against the very spirit of free enterprise. That’s why they call it free ... She’s been polluting Zak’s mind with notions of equality and compassion. Whatever happened to survival of the fittest? Whatever happened to the rich getting richer? ... Whatever happened to pure unadulterated greed ... The first thing I’m going to do is eliminate these so-called Reforms. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s7e24: The Dogs of War, Quark
I believe I’ve earned the respect of the crew as an equal. Star Trek: Voyager s4e5: Revulsion, Doctor to hologram
Twentieth-century America would see a long struggle for equality. America: The Story of the US: Superpower, History 2010
We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for a hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law. Lyndon Baines Johnson, speech to Congress 27th November 1963
It was in the mid-’70s that the fight for equality really gained momentum. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s III: Goodbye Great Britain 75-77, BBC 2012
95,329. The ’70s marked a watershed in the battle for sexual equality. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You IV: Me, Myself & I, BBC 2015
There is a great stir about coloured men getting their rights, but not a word about the coloured women; and if coloured men get their rights, and not coloured women theirs, you see the coloured men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. Sojourner Truth, speech to Equal Rights Convention 1867
‘In six months’ time your union won’t exist. Industry cannot afford to pay women the same rates as men ... It will collapse under the weight of the extra wages.’ Made in Dagenham 2010 starring Bob Hoskins & Miranda Richardson & Sally Hawkins & Geraldine James & Rosamund Pike & Andrea Riseborough & Jaime Winstone & Daniel Mays & Richard Schiff & Phil Cornwell et al, director Nigel Cole, Ford boss
Ford Women Fight On ... Tide Turns Against Dagenham Women. ibid. newspaper headline
‘Rights is not privileges.’ ibid. Rita
‘It was a matter of principle. You had to stand up and do what was right otherwise you wouldn’t be able to look yourself in the mirror ... When did we in this country decide to stop fighting? ... We are the working classes, the men and the women ... Equal pay for women is right.’ ibid. Rita at conference
Join the Union, girls, and together say, Equal Pay for Equal Work! Susan Brownell Anthony, 1820-1906
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that ... They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. Do you know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your social security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And do you know something – they’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the big club! By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe ... what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people ... continue – and these are people of modest means – who continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. George Carlin, Who Really Controls America
Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power. It is a movement which already exists, not as a mode of production (there can be no communist island within capitalist society), but as a tendency which originates in real needs. Communism does not even know what value is. The point is not that one fine day a large number of people start to destroy value and profit. All past revolutionary movements were able to bring society to a standstill, and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communization, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighbourhood, close down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be technically improved, do away with school as a specialized place which cuts off learning from doing for fifteen odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison themselves in three-room family units – in short, it will tend to break all separations. Communism believes in equality through force. Gilles Dauve
In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.
This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t. Paul Foot, Born Unfree and Unequal
If you believe in equality, if you believe in standing up for the rights of all, especially for people most affected by bigotry and discrimination, then you have no choice but to be present and accounted for when it comes to standing up for gays and lesbians in our society. Michael Moore
Some people are surprised that the Republicans are waging a war on women, or that they voted against equal pay for women. I’m not surprised at all. In some ways, it may be a good thing. They’re defending the patriarchy, which is a wounded beast! And wounded beasts are always dangerous. Jane Fonda
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
The righteousness of God is a kind of sharing along with equality. There is equality in the heaven which is stretched out in all directions and contains the entire earth in its circle. Epiphanes on Righteousness
But when the righteous turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and doeth according to all the abominations that the wicked man doeth, shall he live? All his righteousness that he hath done shall not be mentioned: in his trespass that he hath trespassed, and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die.