"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they 
will be best attained when
all persons alike share in the government to the utmost."

Aristotle, Source: Politics, 343 BC

"The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights... This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another."

Milton Friedman, Source: Capitalism and Freedom, 1962


"Law givers or revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either utopian dreamers or charlatans."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."

F.A. Hayek


"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."

David Reisman, American Sociologist

"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common save one word: equality, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude, while democracy seeks equality in liberty."

Alexis de Tocqueville

"There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1 -Chapter III


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