Quotes About Equality

All the men added together made the solid world-- they were the marbles in the jar, and women were whatever sand or water or air claimed the space left between them. That's how I saw things as a young woman, that was my women's studies . Now I've come to know that women are like vodka poured over men, who melt away like ice cubes.

I never saw music in terms of men and women or black and white. There was just cool and uncool.

I think everybody has a right to happiness and freedom and security and health care and education and guitar lessons.

In America, the pool is a privilege. People have historically had complicated feelings about water. Mixing in it deliberately—as men and women, as rich and poor, as black and brown and white—can stir up all kinds of fears. As a society, we've kept different groups apart based on those fears.

Though class lines had been erased at the pool, race lines hardened even further, resulting in riots and racial segregation.

This was a fight not just for the right of access but for the right of recreation, of leisure, no matter what your skin color. Many activists saw pools and beaches as the ultimate symbols of that freedom. In the mingling of bodies, in the act of sharing the same water with others, you can read volumes.

The original prohibitions at public pools were put in place in fear of this very thing: people of different races, genders, and backgrounds mixing together.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...

If you're not at the table you're on the menu?

Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties; it doubts our concern, and it questions our commitment. Six and a half thousand Africans are still dying every day of preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity: This is about Justice and Equality.

To be one, to be united is a great thing but respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

There is no them. There's only us.

One love, one blood One life, you got to do what you should One life, with each other Sisters, brothers One life, but we're not the same We get to carry each other, carry each other.

Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die.

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

In all things that are purely social we [black and white] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.

I pity from the bottom of my heart any individual who is so unfortunate as to get into the habit of holding race prejudice.

The great human law that in the end recognizes and rewards merit is everlasting and universal.