Quotes about equality

Article 1. Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture... have simply made us all members of one class.

To me, my Judaism means an obligation to pay attention to equality and the rights of minority groups.

For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge.

Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty.

The big men in the other boat crews would always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim. But somehow these little guys, from every corner of the nation and the world, always had the last laugh, swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us. SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed; not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education, and not your social status. If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.

We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

[T]he modern world fails to square liberty with equality.

But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and lacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as a foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

"Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land-there's always more land. it's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other."

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common.

The great and the humble have the same misfortunes, the same griefs, the same passions; but the one is at the top of the wheel, and the other near the center, and so less disturbed by the same revolutions.