James Fitzjames Stephen Quotes

All inequality that has no special utility to justify it is injustice.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

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

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.

If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

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.

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.

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

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

Equality is a monster.

... all good Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, ... interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special rights.

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

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.

… injustice breeds injustice

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.

… all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

I must be intellectually honest and say there is a great justice deficit among us. Not all Brazilians are treated equally.

I don't have general views about anything, except social injustice.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.