Egalitarianism Quotes

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy...

But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head...

The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.

From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”
― John Ball

“To all you defenders of democracy, I'd like one answer: all of us acknowledge that there are hordes of stupid people out there. Why do you want to give them political power?”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Anyone can write male sexist fiction. Anyone can write feminist propaganda. I hope to avoid both, and to entertain you while I'm doing it.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sword and Sorceress

“Yesterday I was stupid, so I wanted to change the world. Today, I am more stupid, so I am changing the world. And tomorrow there will be a hundred more stupid like me, for this stupidity for changing the world can never accept any excuse for inaction, even if that excuse happens to be a most rational reason.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Operation Justice: To Make A Society That Needs No Law

“If a builder and an architect sit at the same table, does one role become more like the other? Or do they work better together because of it?”
― James Islington, An Echo of Things to Come

“Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man's ordinary will to a higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality and humility.”
― Irving Babbitt, On Literature, Culture, and Religion

“Equality makes everyone into a prostitute for social influence points, or status. This leads them to become entirely self-serving, independent of their actual role in civilization, and this leads to a mixture of arrogance, pretense, narcissism and solipsism which is the defining feature of the person in the egalitarian society.”
― Brett Stevens

“Nature gave the same form to all
And warms each one with the same heat
Using reason, we follow her inclination
To give equal opportunity to our fellow humans
Who are our brothers.

None should seek felicity
To the detriment of his neighbor.
Depriving oneself of a pleasure to offer it to others
Is the sign of a noble heart
And the expression of wisdom.

Thus nature and reason go hand in hand
And ask us to help one another
For the good of all and by common agreement
We share
In the feast of life.”
― Roxanne Moreil, L'âge d'or. Volume 1

“The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased.”
― Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry in the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth... The Remedy

“Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property.”
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed

“Finnish women are dominant,' Roman Schatz enthused. 'Traditionally, on Finnish farms the woman was chief of everything under the roof, including the males, and the men were there to take care of everything outside. No Finnish man would ever decide anything without consulting his wife. Men do the dishes. We don't have housewives in Finland - no one can afford to live from one salary. Women don't stay at home and breast-feed, they have their own careers and bank accounts. It's great - my divorce only cost me a hundred euro.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“We had found a more binding union than could be afforded us through mere Particle Egalitarianism. Now, we were all residents of the Accursed Lands.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Better an egalitarian infidel than a dogmatizing evangelist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“We talk about creating an utopia, but we install an empire and we build our success on the back of the exploited.

We talk about equality, but we ignore the power structures that silence the voices of the less powerful.

We talk about meritocracy, but we only promote and care for those from the core planets.

We talk about science and rationality, but we pray to extinct gods and worship mutated humans.”
― Maya Darjani, Ancient as the Stars: A Space Opera Adventure

“Mind of A Human (The Sonnet)

My kind of dance is the dance of inclusion,
A dance that can't be contained with labels.
My kind of art is the art of assimilation,
An art that is beyond all intellectual fables.
My kind of science is the science of revolution,
A science that is incorruptible by bigotry.
My kind of faith is the faith in egalitarianism,
A faith that is untainted by bookish crookery.
My kind of economics is the economics of equality,
An economics guided by conscience not greed.
My kind of politics is the politics of sanity,
A politics that serves all beyond the politician's need.
I dream of a progress that is not regress in disguise.
Wielding warmth and reason we’ll truly rise.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society

“The egalitarianism that is the most offensive is the notion, whether embodied in opinion or law, that every way of behaving is as good as any other and that the man who stands apart by reason of his dignity, restraint, and discernment is somehow an Enemy of the People”
― Brad Miner, Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry

“Equal access to the essentials of life, is not an ism, it is the first step towards the abolition of all isms.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“This is why Lacan was deeply skeptical about the notion of distributive justice: it remains at the level of the distribution of goods and cannot deal even with a relatively simple paradox of envy - what if I prefer to get less if my neighbour gets even less than me (and this awareness that my neighbour is even more deprived gives me a surplus-enjoyment)? This is why egalitarianism itself should ever be accepted at its face value. The notion (and practice) of egalitarian justice, insofar as it is sustained by envy, relies on an inversion of the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others: 'I am ready to renounce it, so that others will (also) not (be able to) have it!' Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice, Evil here emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice - a readiness to ignore my own well-being if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of its enjoyment ...
This, however, does not work as a general argument against all projects of egalitarian emancipation but only against those which focus on redistribution.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“How does Plato solve the problem of avoiding class war? Had he been a progressivist, he might have hit on the idea of a classless, equalitarian society; for, as we can see for instance from his own parody of Athenian democracy, there were strong equalitarian tendencies at work in Athens. But he was not out to construct a state that might come, but a state that had been—the father of the Spartan state, which was certainly not a classless society. It was a slave state, and accordingly Plato’s best state is based on the most rigid class distinctions. It is a caste state. The problem of avoiding class war is solved, not by abolishing classes, but by giving the ruling class a superiority which cannot be challenged. As in Sparta, the ruling class alone is permitted to carry arms, it alone has any political or other rights, and it alone receives education, i.e. a specialized training in the art of keeping down its human sheep or its human cattle.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“The fact that acute differences exist between social and cultural classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but in the United States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even the idea that social classes exist has long been taboo. It is, however, a writer’s specialty to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to show in the interaction of people the difference between what we profess and how we act. Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially useful for the writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is the test of his skill.”
― Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

“The doctrines of egalitarianism and of sufficiency are logically independent: considerations that support the one cannot be presumed to provide support also for the other.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Inequality

“Give me a keyboard, I'll give you revolution.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“One Australian tradition is to cut down the elite and the successful. It had its roots in the era of convicts who naturally opposed those in authority. This levelling or egalitarian tradition continued to flourish on the goldfields in the 1850s when the unusual mining laws gave everyone an opportunity to find gold, and the tradition was accentuated around 1900 by the rising trade unions. The attitude was one of the spurs to Australian democracy.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People Volume 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia

“Either you'll know me as a national hero of every nation, or you won't know me at all.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“Either you'll know me as a national hero
of every nation, or you won't know me at all.
So long as a single human calls me foreigner,
I'll conclude, I've achieved nothing at all.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“The next revolution won’t be about the hydrogen molecule at the leading edge of the wave that shouts, ‘that’s right everybody follow me!’ It will be about the groundswell that caused the wave to begin with.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“The sensible women who, if they wanted, would certainly be able to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and ideas, are precisely those who, if they are not qualified, never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the room and talk women’s talk to one another. They don’t want us, for this sort of purpose, any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other. Live and let live. They laugh at us a good deal. That is just as it should be. Where the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection and Eros— cannot be Friends—it is healthy that each should have a lively sense of the other’s absurdity. Indeed it is always healthy. No one ever really appreciated the other sex—just as no one really appreciates children Friendship or animals—without at times feeling them to be funny. For both sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical; but the division into sexes enables each to see in the other the joke that often escapes it in itself—and the pathos too.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“First tolerance, then scripture.
First conscience, then science.
First empathy, then philosophy.
First ethics, then engineering.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Your offspring will be studying my canon as their native heritage – my human-centric divinity will be their divinity, my life-centric culture will be their culture, my service-centric science will be their science, my earth-centric existence will be their existence.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock