
Response to Al Sharpton saying to President Obama, "The dream was not to put one black family in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house."
2010s, 2010
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide unspeakable landscape. and looking steadily on it repeated his sentence, 'War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps, and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three thousand kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse."
"And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!"
Response to Al Sharpton saying to President Obama, "The dream was not to put one black family in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house."
2010s, 2010
"A marvelous night for a (Saturn) moon dance" (10 February 2010) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/10/a-marvelous-night-for-a-saturn-moon-dance/
Bad Astronomy blog
In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation (1893)
Context: Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean equal chances for every one to make the most of himself) unless, I say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or action, is equally a mockery.
“Put simply, we must always remember that separate but equal is not equal.”
Regarding the proposal that homosexual couples be limited to civil unions, instead of being allowed to marry.
Office of the Prime Minister http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/news.asp?id=421 (Feb 16, 2005)
“All evils are equal when they are extreme.”
Tous maux sont pareils alors qu’ils sont extrêmes.
Sabine, act III, scene iv.
Horace (1639)
Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, by Joan V. Bondurant (1965) University of California Press, Berkeley: CA, pp. 168-169
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)
Speech in the House of Commons (24 November 1976) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103146
Leader of the Opposition
Context: The word “equality” is often used, but, wisely, rarely defined. The moment one tries to define it, one gets into great difficulty. For example, it cannot mean equality of incomes or earnings; otherwise, we would not need more than one union. Indeed, we would not need one union. If we are to have opportunity, we cannot have equality, because the two are opposite. We may have equality of opportunity, but if the only opportunity is to be equal, it is not opportunity.
1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)
Context: Fundamentally, our chief problem may be summed up as the effort to make men as nearly as they can be made, both free and equal; the freedom and equality necessarily resting on a basis of justice and brotherhood. It is not possible, with the imperfections of mankind, ever wholly to achieve such an ideal, if only for the reason that the shortcomings of men are such that complete and unrestricted individual liberty would mean the negation of even approximate equality, while a rigid and absolute equality would imply the destruction of every shred of liberty. Our business is to secure a practical working combination between the two. This combination should aim, on the one hand to secure to each man the largest measure of individual liberty that is compatible with his fellows getting from life a just share of the good things to which they are legitimately entitled; while, on the other hand, it should aim to bring about among well-behaved, hardworking people a measure of equality which shall be substantial, and which shall yet permit to the individual the personal liberty of achievement and reward without which life would not be worth living, without which all progress would stop, and civilization first stagnate and then go backwards. Such a combination cannot be completely realized. It can be realized at all only by the application of the spirit of fraternity, the spirit of brotherhood. This spirit demands that each man shall learn and apply the principle that his liberty must be used not only for his own benefit but for the interest of the community as a whole, while the community in its turn, acting as a whole, shall understand that while it must insist on its own rights as against the individual, it must also scrupulously safeguard these same rights of the individual.
“We must see that all places, times and conscious organisms are equally "this one."”
For a failure to see this must distort our view by forcing us to accommodate in it what seems to be our own special objective status; and that awkward accommodation must then ruin any prospect of discovering the truly objective universal principles that govern the world.
" An Introduction to Universalism http://nsl.com/misc/zuboff/zuboff1.htm" p. 9