Thomas Huxley Quotes

All men are created equal, it is only men themselves who place themselves above equality.

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

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.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

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

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

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

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

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.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

All men are equal before God, but all men are not equal before men because the differences are obvious.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

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 enjoys being equal.

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.

The writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal. My slaves did not choose their lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we are created for these places.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.

Think of submitting our measure to the advice of politicians! I would as soon submit the subject of the equality of a goose to a fox.

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.

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

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

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