Equality Quotes

Equality sounds simple until you try to define it. These quotes wrestle with justice, fairness, civil rights, and the gap between how things are and how they should be. They come from activists, leaders, philosophers, and people who refused to accept the status quo.

“I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.”

Susan Sontag

More Equality Quotes

“The unionists also for their part, want to minimise the potential for change, not only on the equality agenda but on the issues of sovereignty and ending the union.”

Gerry Adams

“We are all different. Yet we are all God's children. We are all united behind this country and the common cause of freedom, justice, fairness, and equality. That is what unites us.”

Barbara Boxer

“From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.”

Mikhail Bakunin

“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.”

Malcolm X

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

“Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.”

Mary Douglas

“Equality is the soul of liberty there is, in fact, no liberty without it.”

Frances Wright

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.”

B. R. Ambedkar

“I am fiscally prudent and socially progressive. I believe in protecting a woman's right to choose. I believe in marriage equality.”

Andrew Cuomo

“Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.”

Rowan D. Williams

“With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I'm going to press on for equality. I'm going to press on for the sake of our children. I'm going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I am going to press on.”

Barack Obama

“The cry of equality pulls everyone down.”

Iris Murdoch

“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie and the workers want no lying.”

Mikhail Bakunin

“The 2010 global gender gap report by the World Economic Forum shows that countries with better gender equality have faster-growing, more competitive economies.”

Michelle Bachelet

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