“American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.”
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.
“Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
“American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.”
“Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie and the workers want no lying.”
“I happen to agree with many of the liberal emphasis on compassion, justice and equality. I just disagree that it's the government's role to provide everything.”
“Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.”
“I am fiscally prudent and socially progressive. I believe in protecting a woman's right to choose. I believe in marriage equality.”
“Here are the values that I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.”
“All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.”
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
“Well, my view before was a Western view, and I certainly understand marriage equality and civil rights, equal rights for all, but having visited developing nations and some of the poorest nations in the world, I realize how deep it goes and how much work really needs to be done to create equality for all.”
“I believe there is complete equality between men and women. And I believe those passages in the New Testament, not by Jesus, but by Paul, that say women should not adorn themselves, they should always wear hats or color their hair in church - things like that - I think they are signs of the times and should not apply to modern-day life.”
“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”
“I am free of all prejudices. I hate every one equally.”
“Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else.”
“One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.”
“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.”