Quotes About Equality

Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: "Despite our coming of age in an era when women's career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer.

a prim and proper lady who sat up front who had been, I was later told, President Eisenhower's personal pilot when she was a male

American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today," Jennings said.

The thrust of his parent's views, at least when applied to the situation of Mileva Maric rather than Marie Winteler, was that a wife was a luxury, affordable only when a man was making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of that view of a relationship between a man and wife, he [Einstein] told Maric, Because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a life-long contract.

Calling himself "an old-time believer in democracy," he again made clear that his socialist sentiments did not make him sympathetic to Soviet-style controls. "All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left," he said. Some

When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two

Striving for social justice is the most valuable thing to do in life.

I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being

As a Jew who had grown up in Germany, Einstein was acutely sensitive to such discrimination. "The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me," he wrote in an essay called "The Negro Question" for Pageant magazine. "I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them.

Despite the fact that Murray was one of the preeminent civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, most people have never heard of her. She achieved her leadership role and her success in subverting white supremacy by learning from her failures and capitalizing on the most incremental successes.

All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left

no "natural or religious reason [for] the distinction of men into kings and subjects.

Franklin's own idea was more expansive: he believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed based on their diligence

His ideal was of a prosperous middle class whose members lived simple lives of democratic equality," writes James Campbell. "Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.

How do we distinguish between traits that are true disabilities and ones that are disabilities mainly because society is not good at adapting for them?

In our time equality is confused with conformity – as Nietzsche sees it– and it is taken to involve the renunciation of personal initiative and the demand for a general leveling. Men are losing the ambition to be equally excellent, which involves as the surest means the desire to excel one another in continued competition, and they are becoming resigned to being equally mediocre.

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.

the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.

But Socco, Mustafa Ali said. If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words? Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah.

Why did you need to see my ID?" "This is an exclusive service, Mr. Orlean," she said with no chink of humanity in her face. "And we like to know exactly who it is we're dealing with." "Oh," I said. "So it wasn't because of my clothes or my race?" "The lower races come in all colors, Mr. Orlean. And none of them get back here.

Of course, I always knew that there was no real difference between the races, but still, it was nice to see an example of that equality.