Liberty Vs Equality Quotes

If you have maximum liberty then the strong can destroy the weak, and if you have absolute equality, you cannot have absolute liberty …. Total liberty can be dreadful, total equality can be equally frightful.

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist…. no one since Thomas Jefferson ... has really believed it.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have argued that policies embraced by a majority of Americans to promote equality of opportunity actually infringe liberty by hampering businessmen's actions or taking their money through taxes.

The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them.

It's very easy for liberals and conservatives to agree upon liberty, but it is harder for them to agree upon equality.

We learn that Comrade [President of South Africa Nelson] Mandela has announced in a speech that he hopes for a bright future in South Africa for ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ Anyone who has thought about it realizes that liberty and equality are antithetical concepts. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you certainly cannot have both. As to that, either concept is a rather futile goal. Equality is biologically impossible, and liberty is only obtainable in homogeneous populations very thinly spread.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

When all the objectives of government include the achievement of equality - other than equality before the law - that government poses a threat to liberty.

If speech always wins, even if it's an atomic secret that's going to be broadcast to our enemies, it's easy to make a decision. Speech always wins. But it doesn't... Liberty doesn't always trump equality or equality always trump liberty.