Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), line 84.
Tragedies
“In short, you are all equal in everything except in ideas!”
“None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it.”
Anna Wulf
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.
Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
H. Rosner, trans. (Bantam: 1971), p. 140
Siddhartha (1922)
Context: What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find. … When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
“He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.”
Source: Political Treatise (1677), Ch. 9, Of Aristocracy, Continuation
“6384. He that would please all, and himself too,
Undertakes what none could ever do.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.”
Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. V, Part 2; this might be the ultimate inspiration of the later slogan coined in 1848 by Anselme Bellegarrigue (and often attributed to Proudhon): "Anarchy is order, government is civil war."
“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”
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
