#inequality

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#dignity #empowerment #envy #feminism #gender

I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice. ↗

— Wallace Shawn

#injustice #laura-flanders #life #occupy-wall-street #protest

Le privilège économique détenu par les hommes, leur valeur sociale, le prestige du mariage, l'utilité d'un appui masculin, tout engage les femmes à vouloir ardenment plaire aux hommes. Elles sont encore dans l'ensemble en situation de vassalité. Il s'ensuit que la femme se connaît et se choisit non en tant qu'elle existe pour soi mais telle que l'homme la définit. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#gender-roles #men #women #men

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#inequality #politics #nature

L'ideologie chrétienne n'a pas peu contribué à l'oppression de la femme. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#female-oppression #gender-inequality #religion #religion

Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or values of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless life. Simply put, equality in misery -- that is, equality of result or conformity -- is advanced as a just, fair, and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, except where it avails equality. ↗

— Mark R. Levin

#malcontents #utopianism #equality

American journalists tend to treat inequality as a fact of life. But it needn't be. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#fact #inequality #journalists #life #needn

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#below #degrees #egypt #half #income

What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights. ↗

— B. R. Ambedkar

#discrimination #full #fundamental #fundamental rights #having

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell." (America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938) ↗

— Pearl S. Buck

#double-standards #empowerment #inequality #prison #women