Quotations about Equality and Difference

People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities. ~Linda Ellerbee


In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards. ~Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950


Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven. ~Yiddish Proverb


An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain - the equality of all men. ~Ignazio Silone


Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. ~Italian Proverb


In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave. ~John James Ingalls


We didn't all come over on the same ship, but we're all in the same boat. ~Bernard M. Baruch


As experience widens, one begins to see how much upon a level all human things are. ~Joseph Farrell


Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today. ~Malcolm X


Before God we are all equally wise and equally foolish. ~Albert Einstein


The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold.... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think. ~René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637 (translated)


All the people like us are We,
And everyone else is They.
~Rudyard Kipling, We and They, 1926


While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. ~Eugene V. Debs, Cleveland, 1917


Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: That you are dreadfully like other people. ~James Russell Lowell, "Democracy Address," Birmingham, England, 6 October 1884


There is no saint without a past, and no sinner without a future. ~Shri Haidakhan Babaji


The tears of the red, yellow, black, brown and white man are all the same. ~Martin H. Fischer


Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear. ~Isa Upanishad


Death and dice level all distinction. ~Samuel Foote, The Minor


There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch


It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets. ~Robert Ingersoll, A Lay Sermon