"All Men being naturally equal, as descended from a common Parent, enbued with like Faculties and Propensities, having originally equal Rights and Properties, the Earth being given to the Children of Men in general, without any difference, distinction, natural Preheminence, or Dominion of one over another, yet Men not being equally industrious and frugal, their Properties and Enjoyments would be unequal."
"The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent."
"It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has made nothing equal; her sovereign law is subordination and dependence."
"Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal."
"Equalisation laws, made at the expense of existing rights and expectations, are alike destructive to present security in respect to property, and to permanent security in respect of subsistence. The desire to establish such laws, or to cause them to be established — the love, the passion for equality, has its root, not in virtue, but in vice; not in benevolence, but in malevolence. . . . The passion for equality has no root in the benevolent affections: its root is either simply in the selfish affections, or in the selfish, combined with the malevolent. . . . The lover of equality, in its most refined form, is the man to whose eyes the spectacle of another’s prosperity is intolerable. What is the envious man but the same? What, then, is this so much boasted passion for equality? It is a propensity which begins in vice and leads to ruin. In the scale of merit, it is as much below selfishness as selfishness is below the virtue of benevolence."
"Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity."
"Legislation to apply the principle of equal pay for equal work without discrimination because of sex is a matter of simple justice."