John Adams Quotes

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

Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit, to society, and scattered with equal hand throughout all its conditions.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

Distinction in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

Our democracy may have an aristocracy of talent, as Jefferson said – which is fine – but we don’t want everyone else to be left out. Something like that seems to be happening, though.

While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community, the tendency of people’s suffrage will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in a few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in greater degree considered only as a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

I want nothing to do with privilege.

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.

Equality ... is the result of human organization.... We are not born equal.

In this country there is no rank but rank mutton.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

Income inequality is not a bad thing. Income inequality is a good thing.

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.

There seems to be an idea abroad in this land as well as in others, that a certain class of people are for the purpose of producing servants for another class of people, and that this servant-producing class has no right to give their children an education that is calculated to elevate them above the position of their parents. We are not in sympathy with this idea.

To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth ought not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration.

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…

A meritocracy increases inequality --- by its very nature, it has to.

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

As long as inheritance lasts, there will be hereditary economic inequality—not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes—which will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the source and sanction of all political and social inequality.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.