Voltairine de Cleyre Quotes

No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.

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.

Everyone has an equal right to inequality.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

Equality ... is the result of human organization.... We are not born equal.

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

For Americans the doctrine of universal equality is a doctrine of death …

Inequality is a fact. Equality is a value.

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

I'm very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It's not a one-sided thing.

It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.

If it doesn't reach the last poor man, your constitution is wrong.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

To unequal privileges among members of the same society the spirit of our nation is, with one accord, adverse.

We’ve taken care not to penalize the wealthy but we have to redistribute some income …It is through reform that we can obtain fairness in the modern world…A reformed welfare state is the only way to obtain social justice.

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

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.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.

I have always said that I want Malawi to attain growth that should not just be seen in GDP, but in the growth of opportunities for all, protection for all, and equality for all.

We live in a world where equality is pretty important.

I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value.