25 Key Quotes on Equality

We need some clarity with the concept of equality:

Equality, rightly understood, is a great thing. Wrongly understood, it can result in all sorts of problems. One crucial understanding of equality is this: ‘Nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.’ That concept will be teased out more fully below. So will the notion that equal opportunity is not the same as equal outcomes.

Thus the views of leftists and socialists differ markedly from conservatives and lovers of freedom on these matters. Below are 25 quotes by 14 authors – some Christian, some not. Some deal with economic issues, while others deal with social, legal and philosophical considerations. They demonstrate that while we are all equal as made in God’s image, we are quite different in so many other ways.

Aristotle

“Equality in morals means this: things that are alike should be treated alike, while things that are unalike should be treated unalike in proportion to their unalikeness.”

“Equality and justice are synonymous: to be just is to be equal, to be unjust is to be unequal.”

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”

Vladimir Bukovsky, Soviet dissident

“This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people’s minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, accompanied by attempts to straighten the stooped and shorten the tall.”

Matthew Cochran

“Some of our most poisonous philosophies have only managed to afflict America under the aegis of this kind of equality. No matter what our differences may be, we are told that these differences make no difference because we are all equal. Yet civilization hinges on the being able to recognize and judge certain differences. When we willfully fail to do so, the natural consequences are dire.”

Will Durant (citing Voltaire)

“‘Those who say that all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they mean that all men have an equal right to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and to the protection of the laws’; but ‘equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers’.”

Milton Friedman

 “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

“Neither equality before God nor equality of opportunity presented any conflict with liberty to shape one’s own life. Quite the opposite. Equality and liberty were two faces of the same basic value—that every individual should be regarded as an end in himself. A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades—equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government and of government-imposed restrictions on our liberty.”

“The clue to what Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries meant by equal is seen in the next phrase of the Declaration—‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Men were equal before God. Each person is precious in and of himself. He has unalienable rights, rights that no one else is entitled to invade. He is entitled to serve his own purposes and not to be treated simply as an instrument to promote someone else’s purposes. ‘Liberty’ is part of the definition of equality, not in conflict with it. Equality before God—personal equality—is important precisely because people are not identical. Their different values, their different tastes, their different capacities will lead them to want to lead very different lives. Personal equality requires respect for their right to do so, not the imposition on them of someone else’s values or judgment. Jefferson had no doubt that some men were superior to others, that there was an elite. But that did not give them the right to rule others.”

Frederick Hayek

“If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level … There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”

“To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not to give them the same subjective chance. It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality—all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.”

“Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

Russell Kirk

“There are six canons of conservative thought: . . . 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a ‘classless society.’ With reason, conservatives have been called ‘the party of order.’ If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.”

C. S. Lewis

“‘I thought love meant equality,’ she said, ‘and free companionship.’
‘Ah, equality!’ said the Director. ‘We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.’
‘I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.’
‘You were mistaken,’ said he gravely. ‘That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes – that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue book’.”

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes and film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served. Deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

“Every intrusion of the spirit that says ‘I’m as good as you’ into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.”

Lawrence Reed

“Consider two violinists. One plays in an underground subway for whatever coins that passersby toss into his violin case. The other performs in concert halls before audiences of thousands. It does not matter that they may play the same tunes and be equally pleasing to the ear. The income of the first one will never come close to the income of the second unless and until he cleans up his act and finds himself a good marketer. This is economic inequality. It arises through no compulsion and reflects very different magnitudes of service to happy customers. It’s both natural and beneficial.”

Dan Sanchez

“The Declaration of Independence famously proclaimed that ‘all men are created equal.’ Thanks in part to that prestigious endorsement, ‘equality’ has become a widely held social ideal. But what most modern-day egalitarians promote is far removed from the kind of equality that the authors of the Declaration were referring to. Many today invoke ‘equality’ to deny any variation in qualities among individuals, or in the resulting qualitative tendencies among sets of similar individuals. They condemn any acknowledgment of differences in aptitude, ability, character, and accomplishment as an affront to equality. Many also call for ‘equality of outcome.’ They regard inequality of outcomes—of wealth, income, services, treatment by private individuals, etc—as a moral outrage to be rectified.”

Thomas Sowell

“Equality of rights does not mean equality of results. I can have all the equal treatment in the world on a golf course and I will not finish within shouting distance of Tiger Woods.”

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”

“Nothing so intractably conflicts with our desires for equality as geography. Yet the physical settings in which races, nations, and civilizations have evolved have had major impacts on the cultures developed within those settings. At its simplest and crudest, the peoples of the Himalayas have not had an equal opportunity to acquire seafaring skills. Nor have Eskimos had an equal opportunity to acquire knowledge and experience in growing pineapples or other tropical crops. Too often the influence of geography on wealth is thought of narrowly, in terms of natural resources that directly translate into wealth, such as oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. But, important as such differences in natural wealth are, geography influences even more profound cultural differences among the people themselves. Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on small islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures of those people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically, is their technological advancement. While the rest of the world exchanges goods, knowledge, and innovations from a vast cultural universe, isolated peoples have been largely limited to what they alone have been able to develop.”

Mark Steyn

“By pretending that all cultures are equal, multiculturalism doesn’t preserve traditional cultures so much as sustain them in an artificial state that ensures they will develop bizarre pathologies and mutate into some freakish hybrid of the worst of both worlds.”

Margaret Thatcher

“What are the lessons then that we’ve learned from the last thirty years? First, that the pursuit of equality itself is a mirage. What’s more desirable and more practicable than the pursuit of equality is the pursuit of equality of opportunity. And opportunity means nothing unless it includes the right to be unequal and the freedom to be different. One of the reasons that we value individuals is not because they’re all the same, but because they’re all different. I believe you have a saying in the Middle West: ‘Don’t cut down the tall poppies. Let them rather grow tall.’ I would say, let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so. Because we must build a society in which each citizen can develop his full potential, both for his own benefit and for the community as a whole, a society in which originality, skill, energy and thrift are rewarded, in which we encourage rather than restrict the variety and richness of human nature.”

Walter Williams

“Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we’d be proportionately distributed by race [and gender] across incomes, education, occupations, and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionality being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.”

[2131 words]