Evan Esar Quotes

The sole equality on earth is death.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

Pale death, with impartial step, knocks at the hut of the poor and the towers of kings.

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

The true meaning of the word ‘Equality’ is—“No one better off than I am."

Equality is what does not exist among mortals.

We came equals into this world, and equals shall we go out of it.

It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.

You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

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

Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.

We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

I'm trying to equalise the world to say there is no high and low.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

If the spirit of equality means anything, it means like opportunity, and if we once lose like opportunity, we lose the only chance we have toward equality throughout the nation.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

In the democracy of the dead all men are at last equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.

There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.

All who have died are equal.