“More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that is why we have the United Nations.”
“His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.”
“Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don t want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don t.”
“Bei den Hochgestellten gilt das Reden vom Essen als niedrig. Das kommt: sie haben schon gegessen.”
“She d been taught that pants were inappropriate for girls because they were immodest [...] If women s pants were suggestive, men s were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. There was almost always a bulge--you couldn t help but notice it--and if the pants were tight, you could see practically everything. And the way men were always drawing attention to it! Touching and scratching themselves with total unselfconsciousness, as if they were alone and not in public. She d even seen Aidan do it a few times, absent-mindedly. And yet no one accused men of being improper or of encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn t mean she was inviting anything.”
“The eye of true equality often seems to have some degree of disrespect for the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty to the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty, although in reality, it s simply irrespectiveness.”
“The first commendment of hte post 1970s meritocracy can be sumed up as follows: Thou shall provide equality of opportunity to all, regardless of race, gender, or sexual oritentation, but worry not about equality of outcomes. But what we ve seen time and time again is that the two aren t so neatly separated. If you don t concern yourself at all with equality fo outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish.”
“We are the children of one creator. We are different in some ways. Yet, we are equal.”
“The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!”
“After all, people seemed quite easy about having their rights and liberties taken away by those they looked up to, but somehow a space on the perch was a slap in the face, and treated as such.”
“Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers — and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.”
“There can have been no doubt in Eleanor s mind as to what was expected of her as a wife. In her day, women were supposed to be chaste both inside and outside marriage, virginity and celibacy being highly prized states. When it came to fornication, women were usually apportioned the blame, because they were the descendants of Eve, who had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, with such dire consequences. Women, the Church taught, were the weaker vessel, the gateway to the Devil, and therefore the source of all lechery. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: To live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life. Noblewomen, he felt, were the most dangerous so fall. Women were therefore kept firmly in their place in order to prevent them from luring men away from the paths of righteousness. Promiscuity--and its often inevitable consequence, illicit pregnancy--brought great shame upon a woman and her family, and was punishable by fines, social ostracism, and even, in the case of aristocratic and royal women, execution. Unmarried women who indulged in fornication devalued themselves on the marriage market. In England, women who were sexually experienced were not permitted to accuse men of rape in the King s court. Female adultery was seen as a particularly serious offence, since it jeopardized the laws of inheritance. Men, however, often indulged in casual sex and adultery with impunity. Because the virtue of high-born women was jealously guarded, many men sought sexual adventures with lower-class women. Prostitution was common and official brothels were licensed and subject to inspection in many areas. There was no effective contraception apart from withdrawal, and the Church frowned upon that anyway: this was why so many aristocratic and royal bastards were born during this period.”
“In a society where women are truly equal to men, a kid bred by a theist mother and an atheist father is born an agnostic. In a patriarchal society, the kid is automatically an atheist.”
“God created us all with his love, to be equally treated. No human being is superior over another.”
“We are just a certain quantity of cells, all of us!”
“But sometimes...sometimes I wake with a mad thought in my head: What if that boy s life mattered as much as anyone else s, even Caesar s? What if I were offered a choice: to doom that boy to the misery of his fate, or to spare him, and by doing so, to wreck all Caesar s ambitions? I m haunted by that thought - which is ridiculous! It s self-evident that Caesar matters infinitely more than that Gaulish boy; one stands poised to rule the world, and the other is a miserable slae, if he even still lives. Some men are great, others are insignificant, and it behooves those of us who are in-between to ally ourselves with the greatest and to despise the smallest. To even begin to imagine that the Gaulish boy maters as much as Caesar is to presume that some mystical quality resides in every man and makes his life equal to that of any other, and surely the lesson life teaches us is quite the opposite! In stength and intellect, men are anything but equal, and the gods lavish their attention on some more than on others.”
“Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man”