Timothy Noah Quotes

The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

The intelligent quest is for the free society with equality of opportunity. The quest for equality of result is the path to the widest equality of all: despotism.

As Americans, I think we really believe that with the meritocracy that exists in our country, the equality of opportunity is so important to the foundation of our culture and our society.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

I don't think anybody can claim success at any part of our lives, private or professional, if there are others that don't enjoy the same opportunities.

If the spirit of equality means anything, it means like opportunity, and if we once lose like opportunity, we lose the only chance we have toward equality throughout the nation.

Our goal is a classless society.

To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth ought not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration.

In a country where there is no privileged class, genius and industry may attain the highest honors.

A meritocracy increases inequality --- by its very nature, it has to.

All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice.

I think this country is genuinely a meritocracy.

I feel passionately that the opportunities I have had should be available to everyone.

Middle America believes in fair play, an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy - I don't disparage envy, but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.

Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.

We must restore the emotional relationship that people have to the idea of America, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you live, that you have access to the same opportunities that somebody who is born in privilege.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

The advantages and privileges which have hitherto enjoyed by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

In America, opportunity and equality are not a zero-sum game