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

“James Ed went to his office and sat down at his small, metal desk. He smiled as he considered Penny Jones’ plan to shame him out of her life. Would he let her do that? He shook his head as he thought, No way in hell!”
― Shafter Bailey

“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

“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

“The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but "servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds," who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable," he wrote. "It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith's view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. (p. 64)”
― Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought

“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

“Libraries are a cornerstone of democracy—where information is free and equally available to everyone. People tend to take that for granted, and they don’t realize what is at stake when that is put at risk.”
― Carla Hayden

“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

“I confront the question of whether DEI initiatives are divisive and ineffective. The answer is yes on both counts, but not for the narratives propagated by the American ruling class of oligarchs. Rather, we should consider how DEI initiatives have worked just enough to keep the status quo intact for those at the top, while planting the seeds of division between a significant percentage of marginalized and impoverished white people and every other marginalized and impoverished group in the U.S. and beyond.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“The first problem with the word “diversity” is the word itself. Who is diverse in relation to whom? The way diversity is often framed in institutional domains implies that some people are diverse in relation to others. That some need to learn diversity while others have it and bring it to the table. This framing, I argue, has from the start driven a wedge between a significant percentage of marginalized and disadvantaged white people and other marginalized and disadvantaged groups—groups that should naturally be allies, not enemies. The only group that benefits from this divide is a small percentage of privileged whites who use the structure of whiteness to their full advantage.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“By hiding behind the overarching term “white privilege,” the small percentage of privileged whites have ensured the following: first, they remain disguised behind the veil of whiteness and thus maintain the status quo. Second, they ensure that most marginalized white people remain defensive—and come to their defense—whenever their wealth and power are threatened. Third, through the structure of “whiteness,” privileged whites ensure that a large percentage of disadvantaged white people see other groups fighting against similar socio-economic ills as enemies, not allies to unite with in their battle. As such, the first bold proposal I make, if we are serious about social change, is to replace “white privilege” with “privileged whites” to account for the many whites who are not privileged and distinguish them from those who are. The huge number of disadvantaged white people are allies in this battle against the privileged, wealthy ruling class who utilize countless “isms” and “phobias” as sorting devices, while using the term “white privilege” as a tool to prevent any potential allyship between many white people who are not part of their club, yet are misled to think that the problem is everyone else in society except the privileged whites…Precision in language makes a huge difference to ensure all social groups who need to unite and work together have clarity on what kind of changes are needed, and who exactly is blocking change and transformation.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“We hear how diversity and equity are about lowering standards or doing away with them altogether. If DEI initiatives do the work they are supposed to do, they should not be lowering standards. Rather, they should revise and change standards in ways that take into consideration all groups who were never considered when these standards were made.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“Many DEI trainings and narratives have indeed enabled or produced types of people who seem to be looking for excuses to be offended and to construe, sometimes genuine human slips, as intentional micro and macro aggressions. Even worse, the way things have been done has resulted in people who are quick to play identity cards anytime they are confronted with totally unrelated matters like being incompetent in doing their work or other unrelated professional and personal matters. I am in no way condoning or denying the existence of racism, sexism, and countless other forms of exclusions, marginalization, and even violence against so many vulnerable groups and individuals, but I also can’t in good faith ignore the darker side of this coin. For one side to be true, it doesn’t negate the other darker side. In many workplaces and university campuses, we have armies of people who overuse and even abuse the language of ‘feeling violated’ over things like someone mistakenly not referring to them as “they,” but they remain completely silent and unmoved by countless injustices on campus or at work, let alone about atrocities and genocides in the outside world. We have a type that wastes so much time giving themselves and others the ‘permission’ to indulge in selfish acts of complicity, indifference, and silence under the guise of ‘self-care.’

[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“The most common explanation by leaders and those in positions of influence is that equity, diversity, and inclusion take time. My question is, whose time – that of a human or a God? The scriptures tell us that God’s one day is equal to one thousand human years. So, if we are talking in terms of God’s time, it has only been six days. If we are talking in terms of human time, then recorded human history is six thousand years. How much longer are we expected to wait.”
― Faisal Khosa

“Equality is a dream in a marriage where his sacrifices are expected, but hers are celebrated.”
― Viyaanaha, Mr. - Untold story of husbands

“It is up to all of us to fix this. It’s not gonna be because somebody comes and saves ya. You know, the most important office in this democracy is the citizen, the ordinary person, who says “nah, that’s not right.”

And I do think one of the reasons that our commitment to democratic ideals has eroded is that we got pretty comfortable and complacent. It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are progressive, or say you are for social justice, or say you're for free speech, and not have to pay a price for it. And now we're at one of those moments where you know what, it's not enough just to say you’re for something, you may actually have to do something and possibly sacrifice a little bit. So yeah, if you're a law firm being threatened, you might have to say, OK, we will lose some business because we’re gonna stand for a principle. If you are a university, you may have to say, figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion? If not, and you're just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, well, that's why we got this big endowment. We'll stand up for what we believe in and then we'll pay our researchers for a while out of that endowment and we'll give up the extra wing, or the fancy gymnasium, we can delay that for a couple years because, you know, academic freedom might be a little more important.

For most of human history and to this day in most places in the world, there is a cost to challenging the powers that be, particularly if they're abusing that power. And I’ve noticed this among some wealthier folks who, you know, after George Floyd, they were right there and a bunch of companies were talking about how they cared about diversity and they wanted to do this and they were all for that and they are mute right now. But what that tells me is it was OK when it was cool and trendy, and when it’s not, eh, not so much.

And that, I think, is what we have to… each of us has to examine in our own hearts, is, alright, we say we're for equality, are we willing to fight for it, are we gonna risk something for it. We say that we’re for rule of law--are we going to stick to that when it’s tough, not when it’s easy. We believe in freedom of speech. Do we stand up for freedom of speech when the other person talking is saying stuff that infuriates us and is wrong and hurtful. Do we still believe in it?”
― Barack Obama

“Never tell the oppressed they should be grateful for less oppression rather than liberation.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Liberty is important and that is why forced segregation was wrong, but forced integration is also wrong, so apartheid was wrong because it forces segregation, and equity is wrong because it forces integration; both of them are wrong.”
― Wanjiru Njoya

“An inability to deal with emotions in healthy ways is what toxic masculinity is all about. And, in most cases, what this really stems from is fear. They're afraid of the world changing, because then they might have to actually work a bit harder to be seen as important within it. So they shit on women and people of colour and anyone else fighting for political equality alongside them and screech about 'SJWs' and feminism being 'cancer' and think this is enough to mask the stench of fear that rolls off them in waves. But as any true Star Wars fan can tell you, fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Imagine a world where empathy replaces fear, equity dismantles hierarchies, and safety becomes a right, not a privilege.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“If we genuinely believe ‘we belong to each other,’ we must dismantle the systems and beliefs that perpetuate division.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Acknowledging privilege isn’t about shame—it’s about accountability and belonging.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“One way to make sure that white and Black Americans have similar levels of wealth would be for society to get a lot more equal, lifting poor Black people out of poverty. But another way to make sure that white and Black Americans have similar wealth would be for a small number of Black people to become extremely rich.

Marxists like Reed are aware of the fact that the latter course of action would ask much less of the rich and powerful, allowing them to keep most of their wealth. This, they worry, makes it much more likely that societies will try to achieve equity through such comparatively cosmetic changes that don’t actually reduce overall inequality. And if America manages to create a few dozen Black billionaires while millions of Americans of all races continue to live in poverty, they conclude, precious little is gained for most people: “The disparitarian ideal is that blacks and other nonwhites should be represented on every rung on the ladder of economic hierarchy in rough proportion to their representation in the general population.” But “a society where making black and white people equal means making them equally subordinate to a . . . ruling class is not a more just society, just a differently unjust one.”
― Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

“For this Rosh Hashonah--the Jewish New Year--
this is what I am reflecting on:
Sh'mirat Ha'Lashon,
guarding our speech.

These are not the worst possible times our country has known
but it may well be leading to them.
While we are holding out for truth, freedom, and equity/parity/diversity/inclusivity,
we must also hold out for (and require from ourselves)
gentleness, compassion, empathy, and perspective.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Real progress doesn’t leave people behind. If it does, it isn’t progress—it’s a race to nowhere.”
― Lawrence Nault