John W. Gardner Quotes

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.

I believe one half of the world is born for the convenience of the other half

We in America – and men across the earth – have trapped ourselves with that word equality, which is inapplicable to the genus man. I wish we would forget it. Stop its use in our country: Let the communists have it. It isn’t fit for men who fling their dreams across the skies. It is fit only for a leveling down of mankind.

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.

Women to govern men, slaves freemen, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations.

Today, we seem to be striving towards injustice, applauding it as though it's a worthy dream, made sacred by the caste system.

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

Nothing is good in this society. This patriarchal society is bad.

Untouchability is a hydra-headed monster.

Caste is not just a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.

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.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for suppressing another.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

The supreme issue, involving all others, is the encroachment of the powerful few on the rights of the many. It is against the system built up by privilege that we must make unceasing warfare.

An issue between a people and a class