Edouard Herriot Quotes

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.

India’s great curse is caste; but English education has already proved a tremendous power in leveled the injurious distinctions of caste

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.

It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand ... no method by which the communities could translate their desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals.

The people of England are not, like the people of France, lovers of naked political equality. England is a great lover of liberty; but of equality she never has been so much enamored.

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.

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.

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.

There are no American peasants.

Contemporary capitalist polities need to accept that inequality and insecurity will continue to be the inevitable results of market operations and find ways to shield citizens from their consequences—while somehow still preserving the dynamism that produces capitalism’s vast economic and cultural benefits in the first place.

Brahmins do not have the right to call themselves Indians … If India has to become a modern nation, … It has to establish an egalitarian relationship between Brahmins and the lower castes.

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion.

Equality of opportunity means the achievers must be allowed to achieve.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

If you try and level society, then nobody will do anything.

Don't talk to me about socialism. What we have, we hold.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

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

Income inequality is not a bad thing. Income inequality is a good thing.

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

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.