Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
Religion has no business to formulate social laws and insist on the difference between beings, because its aim and end is to obliterate all such fictions and monstrosities.
In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.... And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently..
That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Everybody thinks that equality comes from identifying people, and that's not where equality comes from.
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.
The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.
You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as a governing principle.
In the many forms of government which have sprung up there has always been an acknowledgement of justice and proportionate equality, although mankind fail in attaining them, as indeed I have already explained. Democracy, for example, arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
… in a republic where all are free and equal--prosperity and position constitute rank.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
What I find most interesting about the U.S. is this idea of equality.
An idea like equality between men and women, which is now accepted in the West, is quite new.
The democrats think that as they are equal they ought to be equal in all things.
As far as male and female are concerned, difference is a biological fact, whereas equality is a political, ethical and social concept. No rule of nature or of social organization says that the sexes have to be the same or do the same things in order to be social, political and economic equals.
You can never have 'equality' between two things that are not equal by definition. And so, for example, you can have equality among 'people', but not between 'men' and 'women'.
Justice is Equality...but equality of what?
There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.
The basic Buddhist stand on the question of equality between the genders is age-old. At the highest tantric levels, at the highest esoteric level, you must respect women: every woman.
Equality ... like freedom, exists only where you are now. Only as an egg in the womb are we all equal.
People have foolishly mistaken equality for sameness. Equality of the genders means that both have equal value and worth, and one is not better than the other. But it doesn't mean we're all exactly the same. And many of us who still believe in gender separation say, 'Vive la difference!
"Racist" is a confusing word, and it should be clarified. Men have no special rights simply because they belong to one race or another. When you say "men," you have already imbued them with all their rights.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
We may think that justice is everyone being equal, having the same rights, sharing the same kind of advantages, but maybe we have not had the chance to look at the nature of justice in terms of no-self. That kind of justice is based on the idea of self, but it may be very interesting to explore justice in terms of no-self.
The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation.
