Equality Quotes

“A closer examination of the facts would have shown that hordes of perfectly free men and women enjoying equal authority, status and access to resources of every kind, including each other's sexuality, have never existed and probably could not have existed. To paraphrase Hobbes, perfect equality, like its concomitant perfect liberty, can only exist when each individual lives alone in a desert, where it is meaningless.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“Inequality, in other words, is precisely the principle upon which their social life is based and is made possible.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“However much some people may resent the fact, in nature inequality and not equality seems to be the rule.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“As so often in history, equality for some can only be achieved by discriminating against all the rest.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“There is equality before God and there is equality here on earth. There is natural equality and there is the kind of equality that human society creates.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“The histories of justice and liberty have often been written. Not so that of equality, which, so far has failed to find its proper biographer. There seems to be no equivalent to Plato's On Justice (better known as The Republic) or to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. That is strange, for equality is quite as important as the other two. Never has this been more true than in our own day. On one hand, we are inundated by volumes that warn us of the dangers of growing socio-economic gaps and by movements that protest against those gaps.[1] On the other, equality’s opposite, discrimination, has not only become taboo but is being used as a lever for all kinds of social reforms, credible and incredible alike.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“In a passage that foreshadows criticisms of equality from his time to the present, he also mentions the “despotism” of the law required to enforce equality and maintain it.[37]”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest