Plato Quotes

You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also.

Our goal is a classless society.

When somebody greedily comes along and thinks that they gonna snatch everything, and you have so many people that have not, the passion that drives me is trying to make them understand that they have to share. So, my art reflects that; the whole reason I do what I do reflects that.

The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.

We may think that justice is everyone being equal, having the same rights, sharing the same kind of advantages, but maybe we have not had the chance to look at the nature of justice in terms of no-self. That kind of justice is based on the idea of self, but it may be very interesting to explore justice in terms of no-self.

Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still themost important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.

As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others.

... an essential feature of a decent society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of outcome - not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state... These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the core of classical liberalism, of Enlightenment thinking... Like Aristotle, [Adam] Smith understood that the common good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues.

Equality is a mortuary word.

Justice has always evoked ideas of Equality, of proportion of compensation. In short, Justice is another name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

None of us can think we are exempt from concerns for the poor and for social justice.

You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake.

For all the injustices in our past and our present, we have to believe that in the free exchange of ideas, justice will prevail over injustice, tolerance over intolerance and progress over reaction.

The need for justice grows out of the conflict of human interests. That is to say, if there were no conflict of interests among mankind we should never have invented the word justice, nor conceived the idea for which it stands.

Every man has a right to be equal with every other man.

Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.

Social progress makes the well-being of all more and more the business of each.

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

We wish, in a word, equality - equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.

In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.

I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all.

The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.

... strike the words "white male" from all your constitutions, and then, with fair sailing, let us sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish together.