Quotes About Equality

It didn't matter how good I was. It was always, 'You're a girl. You can't play with the guys.' It's always been motivation for me.

If there is something that determines my motivation in the work I do, it's the sense of injustice.

In short, attempts to equalize economic results lead to greater—and more dangerous—inequality in political power.

Have we reached the ultimate state of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

Wrongs abound in times and places around the world - inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the world as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.

should also be noted that the Constitution's distinction in counting people for representation in Congress was between slave and free, not black and white. Free blacks were counted the same as whites—and free blacks existed before the Constitution existed.

In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.

But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne—it must go to Parnassus.

could it be said of her that she had been promiscuous? No, that could not be said of her. For she had been as free as air, and one does not qualify the general atmosphere with such a paltry adjective as "promiscuous." She had just slept with everybody—with white, black, yellow, pink, green, or purple—but she had never been promiscuous.

She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbors.

when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel...

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.

You know well as I do that when we are talking on the human plane, questions of justice only arise when there is equal power to compel: in terms of practicality the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must. (Said by Athenian envoy to the Melians)

este evident ca atat omul, cat si Zeii, oriunde dispun de putere si-o exercita dintr-un invincibil impuls al firii. si voi, ca toti ceilalti, ati actiona exact ca noi, daca ati avea o putere egala cu a noastra.

since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife-- nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children.

I have heard women complain about men holding doors for them,, as if it is inherently offensive and implies that they are weak. ... I would hold a door for anyone. ... It has to do with noticing our fellow human beings and saying, I recognize that you're on this planet, and I don't want a door hitting you in the face.

There's little public clamor to judge people not by the color of their passport but by the content of their character.

other tendency emerges because we rarely like the idea of standards that are inconsistent and uneven from place to place. It seems neater and fairer to provide a consistent standard for everything, whether it's education, the road network or the coffee at

Hold onto your dicks." "We don't all have dicks, dickhead," Kasyanov muttered.

Women aren't so keen to have them anymore, not where I come from, anyway. They've got other fish to fry, which is fair enough. But they don't realise, sometimes, what they're missing, or what they're withholding, you know? The power they have.

And let's just be honest, there is no such place called 'justice,' if by that we envision a finish line, or a point at which the battle is won and the need to continue the struggle over with. After all, even when you succeed in obtaining a measure of justice, you're always forced to mobilize to defend that which you've won. There is no looming vacation. But there is redemption in struggle.

So, in Melting Pot the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, America was the new world and Europe was the old, in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.

What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.