Quotes About Equality

It isn't often that the logic behind a policy is so clear. But when it comes to the value of educating girls, the evidence speaks for itself.

I'm asked so many times why I think there aren't more female instrumentalists in jazz. But I never think about it. And I don't think it's been any harder for me to be taken seriously. The music speaks for itself.

There is only one person who represents all Americans. We need a president who speaks out and condemns racism and anti-Semitism. We need a president who recognizes everyone is equal. We are not perfect, but we all deserve respect.

In India and elsewhere in the world, the moment a woman speaks out against harassment, people sort of start making all sorts of character judgments about her, about her morality, about what she was wearing, and all such things, and I think that is not fair.

One thing that really bothers me is when a young black person speaks or leads a conversation, and afterward a white person says, 'You're really articulate.'

Like, I just feel like the way a man speaks to a woman - the way that people speak to each other - it's a respect thing.

No band is special, no player royalty.

Robinson was important to all blacks. To make it into the majors and to take all the name calling, he had to be something special. He had to take all this for years, not just for Jackie Robinson, but for the nation.

What has always made our country special is that it doesn't matter where you come from; it matters where you're going. Our job is to make certain the pathways are open to both our boys and our girls.

We can't have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don't mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

Women face unique challenges in society, no doubt. But focusing narrowly on women as a special interest group isn't the winning play. The ability to pay your bills, send your kids to a good school, and keep your family safe are 'women's issues' after all.

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?

When I was in primary school I was in a special needs group, which is the polite way of saying the dopey kids.

Once I got to the NBA I wanted to continue to work with the Special Olympics and those with special needs.

There is not a special place in Hell for people who didn't support Sarah Palin. Do you know what I mean? It's ridiculous. And there is certainly not a special place in Hell for women who don't support Hillary Clinton.

Social media are a catalyst for the advancement of everyone's rights. It's where we're reminded that we're all human and all equal. It's where people can find and fight for a cause, global or local, popular or specialized, even when there are hundreds of miles between them.

People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about. I don't feel like that's my specialty.

It's no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.

Until men learn to celebrate and operate on the feminine aspect of themselves and stop the oppression of women, children, the environment, other species, we don't have a world to live in. It's not a world that anyone chooses to live in.

The sexes in each species of being... are always true equivalents - equals but not identical.

Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

I don't think of kids as a lower form of the human species.

It's very limiting to us as a species, the concept of better-than/less-than. It just seems to be at its end. I'm like, this all fades to black, and it's gone. It's dust. Choose carefully what you obsess about.

I often laugh and say I should go down to the Department of the Interior and register as an endangered species. I'm a gay man over 60 and I'm alive.