This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and common participation in a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just.
Equality | Memory | Mind | Nations | Peace | Resentment | Rest | Right | Sacrifice |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
It is... possible for a civilized man and woman to be happy in marriage, although if this is to be the case a number of conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a feeling of complete equality on both sides; there must be no interference with mutual freedom; there must be the most complete physical and mental intimacy; and there must be a certain similarity in regard to standards of values.
Equality | Freedom | Happy | Man | Marriage | Regard | Woman |
The most propitious environment for equality is constituted by a society where the means of production are owned cooperatively, where power is decentralized, and where the community is organized in a multiplicity of small, interrelated but, as far as may be, self-governing groups of mutually responsible men and women.
Ashley Montagu, fully Montague Francis Ashley Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg
It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
It cannot be denied that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to everyone the means of rising to the same level with others as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.
True equality can only mean the right to be uniquely creative.
The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
Equality | Inequality |
Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor.
Consideration | Cooperation | Equality | Will |
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.
Determination | Equality | Individual | Inequality | Means |
The thirst for equality is often a respectable form of the desire to have many inferiors and no superiors.
Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice, and justice towards the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.
If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed
In truth the right to the use of land is not a joint or common right, but an equal right; the joint or common right is to rent, in the economic sense of the term. Men must have rights before they can have equal rights. Each man has a right to use the world. The equality of this right is merely a limitation arising from the presence of others with like rights. Society, in other words, does not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any individual, the right to the use of land. That right exists before society and independently of society, belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing only with his death. Society itself has no original right to the use of land. The function of society with regard to the use of land only begins where individual rights clash, and is to secure equality between these clashing rights of individuals.
Birth | Equality | Individual | Land | Man | Men | Regard | Right | Rights | Sense | Society | Truth | Society |
Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition, and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.
Equality |
We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith.
Creed | Democracy | Dignity | Equality | Failure | Life | Life | Method | Rule | Sentiment | Failure | Learn |
Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal.