Often misquoted as: Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter I-V, Chapter III, Part I
“The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times.”
Le désir du privilège et le goût de l'égalité, passions dominantes et contradictoires des Français de toute époque.
in La France et son armée.
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Charles de Gaulle 46
eighteenth President of the French Republic 1890–1970Related quotes
“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”
Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Not attribution to Jefferson earlier than William Jennings Bryan's Baltimore address of January 20, 1900
California Digital Newspaper Collection, Los Angeles Herald http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH19000121.2.94.; appears in proximity to a reference to Jefferson in the 1878 "Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn", reprinting a 1850 Sacramento advertisment
via Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=Cis3Ni8wJkgC&pg=PA280 Samuel Curtis Upham, "Notes of a Voyage to California Via Cape Horn: Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Year 1849-'50, with an Appendix Containing Reminiscences: Together with the Articles of Association and Roll of Members of "The Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California".. Earliest known variant is from the August 31, 1844 issue of "Niles' National Register", authored by the committee of William C. Bryant, George P. Barker, John W. Edmonds, David Dudley Field, Theodore Sedgwick, Thomas W. Tucker, and Isaac Townsend.
via Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=M1oUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA438.
Misattributed
Book Two, Chapter I.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two
“Passion paralyzes good taste.”
Susan Sontag
(1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist
Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
Context: It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
Herbert A. Simon
(1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist
Simon, Herbert A. "The proverbs of administration." Public Administration Review 6.1 (1946): 53-67.
1940s-1950s
Context: Most of the propositions that make up the body of administrative theory today share, unfortunately, this defect of proverbs. For almost every principle one can find an equally plausible and acceptable contradictory principle.
Chinmayananda Saraswati
(1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago
François Furet
(1927–1997) French historian
Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p.191