Quentin Bryce Quotes

In the last twelve years, we have come some distance towards reconciliation and the breaking down of disadvantage. Let us take encouragement from what has been achieved and set our minds and hearts to end the remaining roadblocks.

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

I am deeply committed to the cause of Indigenous Australians, and not just because of the Apology, but the big challenges which lie ahead in closing the gap.

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.

Unless we labor to help others achieve a reasonable stake in society, we may find ourselves losing the society in which we have too great a stake.

Is it possible for men, however far apart in outward circumstances, for the capitalist and the working-man, to use the common phrase, to meet as individuals beneath a friendly roof, open their minds each to each, and not have their "class theories" insensibly modified by the kindly attrition of a personal acquaintance? In the light of our experience I should say not.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

Economic inequality is not about food stamps and homeless shelters. It is about being a devotee of social justice and equality.

The task ahead of us will be extremely challenging as the Tory party continue with their austerity agenda and as we continue to resolve the issues of the past and build unity, reconciliation, and equality.

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?

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

Where else can a guy like me make it? Blind and poor---only in America.

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist…. no one since Thomas Jefferson ... has really believed it.

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to be like each other.

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

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

Certain it is that the Negro soldiers are not fighting and dying to maintain the status quo for their race. Their place now is in the front of the bullets of the enemy, and below the bombs in enemy planes. Bullets, or threats of bullets, are not likely to cause them to bow and scrape once they are home.

The author of the Declaration of Independence and his associates declared equal rights impracticable in society constituted of masses of different races

All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

Women in most countries may take their aspirations for freedom for granted, but for many of us, it is brand new.