Quotes About Equality

We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while other can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream.

Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South.

More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.

We see how inherited wealth grants status without any guarantee of merit or talent.

what would happen, he posed, if one hundred thousand poor children and one hundred thousand rich children were all given the same food, clothing, education, care, and protection? Class lines would likely disappear.

Appointed to a committee to revise Virginia's laws, Jefferson tried another tactic that aimed to shift the balance of class power in the state. He succeeded in eliminating primogeniture and entail, two legal practices that kept large amounts of land in the hands of a few powerful families. His purpose was for land to be distributed equally to all children in a family, not just vested in the eldest male.

The real wonder of America's achievement, he professed, was that the "world's largest capitalist country" had "come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society." These words strike at the heart of the matter. For Nixon, the United States was more than a land of plenty. Democratic in its collective soul, it had nearly achieved a kind of utopia.

democracy of manners," which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to "cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us."68 The

What can be more false and heartless," Adams logged in his diary, "than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?

Tugwell had no patience for the illusion of democracy, or the pretense of being a man of the people, or the empty rhetoric of equal opportunity.

In 1949, an Australian observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a "democracy of manners," which was not the same as a real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to "cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.

meaningful, too, that the recently established Freedmen's Bureau paired impoverished whites and freed people not as cutthroat adversaries, but as the worthy poor. From its inception in 1865, shortly before Lincoln's assassination, the bureau was specifically empowered to extend relief to "all refugees, and all freedmen," black and white.

democracy of manners," which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to "cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.

Superior ability" was not "the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class," he said. Reacting to Adolf Hitler's Aryan fantasy, Wallace predicted that even a "master breeder" might over generations raise a group of people with the same skin, hair, or eye color, but he would just as likely produce a group of "blond morons.

The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation's wealth.

No races, few permitted variant alleles. Anything else arouses hostility

There have always been haters, Stewart. Hate Jews, hate Blacks, hate immigrants, hate Yagaiists who have more initiative and dignity than you do. I'm just the latest object of hatred. It's not new, it's not remarkable. It doesn't mean any basic kind of schism between the Sleepless and Sleepers.

Easy is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.

liberalism denies that there is any fixed or universal human nature.

For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion.

Democrats believe in reigniting the American dream by removing barriers to success and building ladders of opportunity for all, so everyone can succeed.