Skip to content

Equality Quotes

77 quotes about equality. Every quote shows where it comes from and how far to trust it.

Random quote on Equality

Most quoted on equality:

Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony, or true delight?

John Milton

Equality of two domestic powers
Breeds scrupulous faction.

William Shakespeare

Mean and mighty, rotting
Together, have one dust.

William Shakespeare Cymbeline (1611)

The tall, the wise, the reverend head,
Must be as low as ours.

Isaac Watts

Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government.

Abraham Lincoln

We must want equality, and we must grasp that equality does not coexist with class structure.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Equality is the life of conversation; and he is as much out who assumes to himself any part above another, as he who considers himself below the rest of the society.

Richard Steele

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.

Thomas Sowell

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

James Anthony Froude

For the colonel's lady an' Judy O'Grady,
Are sisters under their skins.

Rudyard Kipling Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.

Winston Churchill Churchill by Himself (2008)

In terms of earthly life as you understand it, it is overly optimistic to imagine that eventually all illnesses will be conquered, all relationships be inevitably fulfilling, or to foresee a future in which all people on earth are treated with equality and respect.

Jane Roberts The Way Toward Health (1997)

The new regime will be a social hierarchy. It will no longer be based on the false idea of man's natural equality.

Philippe Pétain

The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent.

Anders Chydenius

It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women.

Rebecca West Woman as Artist and Thinker (1931)

Who wants equality? Those who do not have it.

Marge Piercy My Life, My Body (2015)

Even as the fingers of the two hands are equal, so are human beings equal to one another. No one has any right, nor any preference to claim over another. You are brothers.

Muhammad

We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality—unequal value.

Judith Butler The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)

Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian.

Roderick Long Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice (2012)

Merely pointing to the fact that some people have a lot more than others is less compelling as a critique; it invites the response “So what? Those who have more aren’t hurting anybody; you’re just appealing to envy.” By contrast, being able to show that those who enjoy a higher socioeconomic status have to a considerable extent achieved and maintained that status by forcibly expropriating and oppressing the less affluent provides for a far more effective indictment.

Roderick Long Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice (2012)

Related topics