Some Quotes on Equality and Egalitarianism

"The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth."
- Alexis de Tocqueville

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal."
- Aristotle

"Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. (...) It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top — the aristocracy of non-value."
- Ayn Rand

"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, a new form of servitude."
- Friedrich von Hayek

"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers."
- Friedrich von Hayek

"While under precapitalistic conditions superior men were the masters on whom the masses of the inferior had to attend, under capitalism the more gifted and more able have no means to profit from their superiority other than to serve to the best of their abilities the wishes of the majority of the less gifted."
- Ludwig von Mises

"An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men."
- Ludwig von Mises

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."
- Milton Friedman

"Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible. And each person could not begin from the same point, for the world has not just come into being; it is diverse and infinitely varied in its parts. The mere fact that one individual is necessarily born in a different place from someone else immediately insures that his inherited opportunity cannot be the same as his neighbor’s."
- Murray Rothbard

"The diversity of mankind is a basic postulate of our knowledge of human beings. But if mankind is diverse and individuated, then how can anyone propose equality as an ideal? (...) If each individual is unique, how else can he be made 'equal' to others than by destroying most of what is human in him and reducing human society to the mindless uniformity of the ant heap?"
- Murray Rothbard