Equality Quotes

“Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Sensitive people care when the world doesn't because we understand waiting to be rescued and no one shows up. We have rescued ourselves, so many times that we have become self taught in the art of compassion for those forgotten.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Only stupid men would want stupid wives!”
― Robert Thier, Storm and Silence

“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
― Shirley Chisholm

“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.”
― Stevie Nicks

“Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.”
― Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

“Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness.”
― Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power

“In the true married relationship, the independence of husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.”
― Lucretia Mott

“Democracy arose from men's thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.”
― Aristotle

“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”
― Bertrand Russell

“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.
In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.
In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.

How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?
If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual

“Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life.

Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.”
― Soren Kierkeggard

“Ignorance does not make you fireproof when the world is burning.”
― Nelou Keramati

“What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal (...). There is a tendency (...) for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious-because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe-some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others-some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“I'm not intimidated by anyone. Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a stomach and a head. Just think about that.”
― Josephine Baker

“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”
― Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

“The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.”
― Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

“Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.”
― Italian Proverb

“They say they give their women more freedom, but there's still the impression that the freedom was theirs to 'give' in the first place.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Elantris

“Should I surrender to this bliss? The love, the touch of a child!”
― Andri E. Elia, Yildun: Worldmaker of Yand

“My husband would do anything for me ...' It's degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another."

"It's a very real power, Harriet."

"Then ... we won't use it. If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

“A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy