William Saroyan Quotes

Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

All men are created equal, it is only men themselves who place themselves above equality.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else

Inequality of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in his Constitution of Human Nature that no art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

All men therefore among themselves are by nature equal; the inequality we now discern, hath its spring from the Civil Law.

Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him

All men are created equal in one respect, at least, and that is their desire to be unequal.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

We in America – and men across the earth – have trapped ourselves with that word equality, which is inapplicable to the genus man. I wish we would forget it. Stop its use in our country: Let the communists have it. It isn’t fit for men who fling their dreams across the skies. It is fit only for a leveling down of mankind.

No one enjoys being equal.

No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.

All men are born equal, but some of them outgrow it.

Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things.

The writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal. My slaves did not choose their lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we are created for these places.

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …

God made all men, and he did not make some to crawl on hands and knees and others to ride upon their backs.