Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

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

In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Surely there is something unlovely, to modern as against medieval minds, about marked inequality of either kind income or power.

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things.

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

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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

This whole segregation between famous people and other people is complete rubbish.

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

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

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

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.

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

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

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

The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station…

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

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

Order is Heaven's first law, and this confessed, Some are, and must be greater than the rest -