Equity Quotes

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same. Fairness means everyone gets what they need.”
― Rick Riordan, The Red Pyramid

“Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism

“That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.

- Book VI, 54.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability, must be changed. Walter's case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation that Walter's case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“With you it is always the law, never equity.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“Resist when the world tries to convince you otherwise.”
― Nic Stone, Dear Justyce

“Anger should be especially kept down in punishing, because he who comes to punishment in wrath will never hold that middle course which lies between the too much and the too little. It is also true that it would be desirable that they who hold the office of Judges should be like the laws, which approach punishment not in a spirit of anger but in one of equity.”
― Johannes Voet

“A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Connections, like treasury bonds, are issued to every rich white person upon exiting the womb. Whenever one of them gets high and crashes their parents’ car, whenever they get busted for buying coke from an undercover, whenever they get caught messing with the wrong gangsters on vacation, they make a call, send a text, or whip out their AMEX.”
― Mateo Askaripour, Black Buck

“Historically the division of labour originates in two facts of nature: the ​inequality of human abilities and the variety of the external conditions of ​human life on earth. These two facts are really one: the diversity of ​Nature”
― Ludwig von Mises

“I start out as their biggest fan,
making changes and "we plans"
Then I sit back and watch and see fam.
Then its back to making "me plans"!”
― Renee' A. Lee

“each value on which librarianship prides itself is inequitably distributed amongst society”
― Fobazi Ettarh

“Sea World was treading carefully. Park officials stated repeatedly how essential and valuable Tilikum had been to their operations. This is true. Zoos and circuses are a business, and Blackstone paid 2.3 billion dollars for its purchase. The most productive employees in that business, in terms of labor and revenue, are the orcas themselves. Tilikum has performed for almost nineteen years in Orlando, sired thirteen calves, and produced in the range of a billion dollars in revenue. Nevertheless, Sea World did not believe that Tilikum had earned the right to retire. None of that billion dollars would be used to build an ocean sanctuary for older captive orcas. They do not deserve it.”
― Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

“Our culture is being attacked by every major entity taking over our unique communities and reducing us to nothing more than numbers.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“As the work towards social justice and equity is never done, we have to
challenge what we know to be true.”
― Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. Lopez-McKnight

“For the price of a few battleships, we could give you a healthy nation. We have the knowledge, the skill, the material resources; but those in power prefer to use them for destroying their competitors and safeguarding their own profits.”
― Nicholas Blake, There's Trouble Brewing

“Patriarchy believes emotion is weak and has no place in business or governance. It means leaving pieces of you behind when you sit at the table. It means that if you want to be part of the winning side, you have to comply and be ready to be part of the team without holding them back.

Matriarchal and egalitarian systems promote love-based decision-making and space for people to share their emotions.”
― Elaine Alec, Calling My Spirit Back

“It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“As Negroes move forward toward a fundamental alteration of their lives, some bitter white opposition is bound to grow, even within groups that were hospitable to earlier superficial amelioration. Conflicts are unavoidable because a stage has been reached in which the reality of equality will require extensive adjustments in the way of life of some of the white majority. Many of our former supporters will fall by the wayside as the movement presses against financial privilege. Others will withdraw as long-established cultural privileges are threatened. During this period we will have to depend on that creative minority of true believers.

The hope of the world is still in dedicated minorities. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom have always been in the minority. That creative minority of whites absolutely committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated. It will take such a small committed minority to work unrelentingly to win the uncommitted majority. Such a group may well transform America’s greatest dilemma into her most glorious opportunity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“True equity starts with ensuring that everyone has access to the most basic of needs.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“There would be no 'quiet quitting' if people didn’t feel that they are being quietly marginalized and bullied in the first place.
[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“Countering 'quiet quitting' with 'quiet firing' is immature and vindictive, because it totally ignores the causes that got people to this point.

[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“It is more important to look holistically at the root of why anyone would want to avoid work so badly that they’d game the system and leave the workforce altogether. When work is fulfilling, dignifying, respects our skills and nourishes our talents and souls, it becomes a pleasure not a burden; something we would look for not run away from.

[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“There is a huge shift to rewiring people from working class families to pursue education that is cheap, but profitable for corporations and corporatized educational institutions, and that is just enough for them to be trained as malleable workers at the service of the ruling class and their needs. We are in a country in which the few rich and privileged get quality education, while everyone else gets cheap training and acquire mediocre skills in the form of certificates of completion. The children of the rich go to Yale and Harvard and other big names, while those from poor working-class families get certificates in this or that skill that they can add to their resumes to be desired by employers.

[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“Men without honor cannot build an honorable country. It is height of hypocrisy to expect a country of equity from such men.”
― Olawale Daniel

“The reality is that most people of color learn early in America that we will have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and when we fail, no one will help us fall up.

Immigrants, people of color, and women learn early that in order to make it in Amreeka you have to daft punk it through life. You have to do everything harder, better, faster, stronger, and smarter. Those are just the rules. The streets of Amreeka aren't paved with gold; they're paved with blood. As an immigrant, you'll take a beating but you'll be like Rick Ross and keep hustling. if Bob works eight hours a day, you work ten. If Samantha works late on Friday, then you work on Saturday. You go twenty feet just to get to ten feet.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“As a person of color in America, you need to fly to reach the hallowed gates of wealth and mainstream success while others can just walk. "Good" is not good enough. You have to be exceptional, especially when you don't have the legacy admissions, the generational wealth, the mentors who look like you and come from your communities, and an entire system that benefits one skin color and gender at the detriment of others.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Some people cannot afford to believe that this country isn’t that bad, that as Hillary Clinton said, “America is great because America is good.” America hasn’t always been good. And the greatness, the power and wealth that white people have been afforded, did in fact, as Trump dog whistles with his “Make America Great Again” slogan, come from centuries of killing or otherwise exploiting and subjugating Native Americans, black people, poor people, women, immigrants. It is actually quite difficult to be good, to clean up the dirty laundry rather than let it accumulate on the floor. Everyone would like to believe that they would have been a stop on the Underground Railroad or hidden a Jewish family in their attic. No one wants to believe they’d have been the slave owner or a part of the crowd that gathered to watch the lynchings because it was something to do, or even the person who didn’t go, but didn’t do anything to stop it either.”
― Yaa Gyasi

“It was the USSR, as an emerging basketball power in the 1950s, that first called on Olympic leaders to officially add women's basketball to the program as a medal sport, a half century after the Fort Shaw girls demonstrated the game in St. Louis. Their first attempt came during a June 1955 meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Paris, where the Soviets asked delegates to vote on the adding women's competitions in volleyball, basketball, speed skating, and rowing, all of which were already open to male athletes.”
― Andrew Maraniss, Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First US Women's Olympic Basketball Team