“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.”
“Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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,”
“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.”
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
“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.”
“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,”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What is there to say? Purely and simply this: When a bachelor of philosophy from Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the ground of his color. I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. Wren one else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men .”
“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.”