Quotes About Equality

Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity." Until blacks "stand on level and equal ground," we cannot rest. It must be our goal "to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.

We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.

if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong

He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension

tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution.

Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would "have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of

Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.

The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.

To Lincoln's mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to "elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all." A

For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson's domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape.

Lincoln always believed, he later said, that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and he could not remember when he did not "so think, and feel.

He was learning, Sewall said, what it meant to be an American, the idea that "no man is superior, unless it was by merit, and no man is inferior, unless by his demerit." The profound pleasure Theodore had discovered in a different kind of social life would lead to a reassessment of his future prospects.

Free women, said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

Then he said, 'Well, Matty, we don't seem to go together at all, do we. I'm simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.

What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let's make a foursome!

Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?" "Yes," Ted had said. "Then I can't help you," Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy

There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.

For she is remembering Paul's saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.