Ehud Barak Quotes

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

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

We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses, for the unrepresented consumer – for all … who do not partake of the abundance of American life.

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

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

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

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

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

I didn't want to be discriminated against because of my gender and status. I promised myself I was never going to be treated as a second-class citizen.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

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.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.

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.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

…an enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind…

Why did the world ever become so unequal?

The Negro claims, as a matter of simple justice, his full share in America's economic and social life. He sees adequate employment opportunities as a chief means of attaining this goal

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.

... all good Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, ... interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special rights.