Quotes About Equality

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

Once a month, some women act like men act all the time.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

Public education's commendable aim of creating "equal opportunity for all" is too easily subverted by the egregious aim of creating a clean conscience for the few. If everybody can "read at grade level," then we need not be overly concerned if some people get to read fabulous dividend statements and other people, who may be working twice as hard, get to read pink slips. All we need hope is that the latter sort never get to read Marx.

Patriotism based on the common good does not pander to divisiveness. True patriots don't fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren't homophobic or sexist or racist. To the contrary, true patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the "We" in "We the people.

Democracy depends on citizens who are able to recognize the truth, analyze and weigh alternatives, and civilly debate their future, just as it depends on citizens who have an equal voice and equal stake in it. Without an educated populace, a common good cannot even be discerned. This is fundamental.

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

The probability that a black student will have white classmates has dropped to what it was before 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate schools inherently unequal.

The idea of "the common good" was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for "We the people" seeking to "promote the general welfare"—not for "me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.

Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

no one should confuse income for virtue, net worth for worthiness. The underlying reality is that capitalism is not working as it should or as it can.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

Borrowers can already use bankruptcy to protect their vacation homes and investment properties, so why not their primary homes?

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Commitments to social responsibility are also conveniently reassuring to talented or privileged young people who want to do good while also doing well, and who don't want to acknowledge the cruel joke that, as Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has pointed out, people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

Republicans want us to believe that the central issue is the size of government, but the real issue is whom government is for. Public

We are perilously close to losing an economy and a democracy that are meant to work for everyone and to replacing them with an economy and a government that will exist mainly for a few wealthy and powerful people.

My conclusion is that the only way to reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the game to become organized and unified

All flat-tax proposals benefit the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: today's tax code is still at least moderately progressive. The rich usually pay a higher percentage of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. A flat tax would eliminate that slight progressivity.

It's unfair that middle- and lower-income Americans have been paying a smaller share of federal income taxes and some pay no income tax at all. There's nothing unfair about it. Fairness requires that people who make more money pay a higher portion of their incomes in taxes than people with less money. That's called a progressive tax system, and it's been a foundation stone of America's tax code.

Republicans want us to believe that the central issue is the size of government, but the real issue is whom government is for.

Let America be America again," pleaded Hughes: "The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free. / The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—

During the same period the typical middle-class taxpayer went from paying 15 percent of income in taxes to 16 percent.