Quotes About Equality

Marriage without love is just one more twisted form of slavery.

Can it be true that freedom only exists when it is a treasure, shared by all?

I can't understand why dark northern soldiers and light ones are separated into different brigades. The dead are all buried together in hasty mass graves, bones touching.

Does the work of a girl always have to be so anonymous?

They tell me they do not believe that people are either black or white-- if that were so, then mixed-race children would all be gray instead of a myriad lovely warm shades of natural brown.

Am I a man, or a contract? What sort of society decides that special papers are needed even by beggars?

Señor Lam says those Los Angeles riots were one of the largest mass lynchings in United States history. Only ten men were arrested, only four were convicted, and even they will soon be released. No one in that nation ever pays for any crime against people who look different.

Why can't she see that no two people are exactly alike? Our hearts and minds are all different. Only our dreams share this same desperate need to rise and soar...

At the steamy train station in New Orleans, horrifying signs above drinking fountains announce: COLORED. WHITE. Confused, I drink out of both. Why should it matter if a stream of coo, refreshing water pours into my mouth or another?

When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain?

She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately.

There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.

The media wants to call them riots, but they're uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don't behave and they get all the rights they want.

And white women can reform nothing until and unless they are willing to relinquish their caste privilege, those codes of racial and social superiority they extol in their men and instill in their children.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.

If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon… White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve their privilege. We

We sing more colored than the Africans," boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him.

Civil rights. The New Left. Black Power. Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing.

I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's - or the next fish's, or the next grass-blade's! - and not a whit less.

She had a different kind of boldness, a strength that did not defy that of men so much as ignore it, or take its place without question beside it - Urdda wanted some of that boldness.