Will Durant Quotes

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?

Put simply, we must always remember that separate but equal is not equal.

All men are created equal. Some, it appears, are created a little more equal than others.

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.

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

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

We have tolerance, respect, and equality in our written laws but not in the hearts of some of our people.

Sometimes it leads me even to hesitate whether I am strictly correct in my idea that all men are born to equal rights, for their conduct seems to me to contravene the doctrine.

Let's leave beside them in another pile all the injustices which exist in the northern state.

I don't think we live in a particularly equal society.

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

I have always believed, heretofore, in the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are born free and equal; but of late it appears that some men are born slaves, and I regret that they are not black, so all the world might know them.

There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Of course, there can be serious injustices within free societies.

Well you know, all law is about injustice.

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

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

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

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.

Liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid result.

And Justice for Some