Equality And Fraternity Quotes

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Democracy is in the blood of the Muslims, who look upon complete equality of mankind, and believe in fraternity, equality, and liberty.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality and fraternity.
B.R. Ambedkar
Justice has always evoked ideas of equality, of proportion of compensation. Equity signifies equality. Rules and regulations, right and righteousness are concerned with equality in value. If all men are equal, then all men are of the same essence, and the common essence entitles them of the same fundamental rights and equal liberty... In short justice is another name of liberty, equality and fraternity.
B.R. Ambedkar (Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual)
If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.
B.R. Ambedkar (Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual)
92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.
Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety)
A Path to Equality. — A few hours' mountain climbing make of a rogue and a saint two fairly equal creatures. Tiredness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity — and sleep finally adds to them liberty.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
Democracy is a pretty word. Democracy is a captivating magic. The oppressed classes always wanted and the oppressing ones always promised a democracy. But this was precisely for democracy that the both parts had always fought. The great French Revolution proclaimed the great appeal "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". The history showed that from the class viewpoint, they could indicate different things, distinct contents; these concepts must be filled with different sense. In the class society, in the society locked in a state, Liberty is always at the top of somebody’s spear! Equality is the Achilles’ heel, into which this spear is plunged. Humanity is the pledge for plunging it by all force.  
Todor Bombov (Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face (A New World Order))
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others.12 No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. They
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)
To the meaningless French idealisms: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, we propose the three German realities: Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery.
Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin von Bülow
For us to progress, we must be community in liberty, equality and fraternity.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Way to equality.—A few hours of mountain climbing turn a villain and a saint into two rather equal creatures. Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity—and liberty is added eventually by sleep. 297
Friedrich Nietzsche (Basic Writings of Nietzsche)
Ah, mother! How do you do?' said he, giving her a hearty shake of the hand; 'Where did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch...' On his two younger sisters he then bestowed an equal portion of his fraternal tenderness, for he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly.
Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)
The cry 'Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!' was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.
Louis de Bonald
Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity―and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ' Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.
James Fitzjames Stephen (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity)
Clubs, fraternities, nations—these are the beloved barriers in the way of a workable world, these will have to surrender some of their rights and some of their ribs. A ‘fraternity’ is the antithesis of fraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality. Anyone who remembers back to his fraternity days at college recalls the enthusiasts in his group, the rabid members, both young and old, who were obsessed with the mystical charm of membership in their particular order. They were usually men who were incapable of genuine brotherhood, or at least unaware of its implications. Fraternity begins when the exclusion formula is found to be distasteful. The effect of any organization of a social and brotherly nature is to strengthen rather than diminish the lines which divide people into classes; the effects of states and nations is the same, and eventually these lines will have to be softened, these powers will have to be generalized.
E.B. White (One Man's Meat)
Life’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now. Everything you disapprove of you’ll call “aristocratic.” This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church. If “Liberty” was the watchword of the first Revolution, “Equality” is that of the second. “Fraternity” is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.
Hilary Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety)
A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity – and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;—the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people.
James Fitzjames Stephen (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity)
Mankind will find strength in itself to live for virtue, even without believing in the immortality of the soul! Find it in the love of liberty, equality, fraternity...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
To achieve a society that exhibits liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, the object to change first and foremost is production.
Richard D. Wolff (Understanding Marxism)
Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of citizen-patriots,* with their national muskets in a most explosive state of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.*
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
Lovely girls; bright women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through the streets to slake her devouring thirst. Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;—the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked. But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he had brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be o pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly.
Salman Rushdie (Shame)
From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right. This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but law-governed economy. According to this view, the purpose of politics is not to rearrange society in the interests of some over-arching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium. The goal is to pass on to future generations, and meanwhile to maintain and enhance, the order of which we are the temporary trustees.
Roger Scruton (Green Philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet)
It is our sacred duty," says Napoleone, "to instil into all the European peoples the idea of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And if necessary - with the help of cannon!
Annemarie Selinko (Désirée)
We’re guessing the bonjour ritual is expanding because it underlines equality—a principle the French value much more than either liberty or fraternity.
Julie Barlow (The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed (ST. MARTIN'S PR))
Fraternity was the bridge that would make liberty and equality become ‘the natural course of things’.
Gautam Bhatia (The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts)
International big business has made revolutions before now to safeguard its interests. At one time it made them … in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Now, with Socialism to fight, it makes them in the name of Law and Order and Sound Finance. Assassination? If an assassination is going to be good for business, then there will be an assassination.
Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios (Charles Latimer, #1))
The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore.
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
What would the new teacher, representing France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date--1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.
Mark Twain (Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches)
when the humanist revolution preached the stirring ideals of human liberty, human equality and human fraternity. Since 1789, despite numerous wars, revolutions and upheavals, humans have not managed to come up with any new value. All
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the populace wages battle against, the people. Beggars
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox (Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology)
Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive. A society can be formed around two of them, but never all three. Liberty and equality, if they are strictly observed, will obliterate fraternity; equality and fraternity must extinguish liberty; and fraternity and liberty can only come at the expense of equality. If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity.
Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
The most common occurrence in this world of ours, in these days of stumbling blindly forward, is to come across men and women mature in years and ripe in prosperity, who, at eighteen, were not just beaming beacons of style, but also, and perhaps above all, bold revolutionaries determined to bring down the system supported by their parents and to replace it, at last, with a fraternal paradise, but who are now equally firmly attached to convictions and practices which, having warmed up and flexed their muscles on any of the many available versions of moderate conservatism, become, in time, pure egotism of the most obscene and reactionary kind. Put less respectfully, these men and these women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.
José Saramago
Every revolution other than the American has proven to be a failure or a disaster. The French Revolution, for instance, began with the glorious affirmation of “liberty, equality and fraternity” and ended with Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. What finally brought the Terror to an end was the ascent of Napoleon to the throne. Democracy itself was overthrown, only returning slowly, haltingly, over the subsequent century and a half. The Russian Revolution was an unmitigated disaster from the beginning, and at its nadir it reached depths of tyranny and depravity rivaled only by Mao and Hitler.
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
And you,” I interrupted, “cannot at all imagine the craving I have for fraternal and sisterly love. I never had a home, I never had brothers or sisters; I must and will have them now: you are not reluctant to admit me and own me, are you?” “Jane, I will be your brother—my sisters will be your sisters—without stipulating for this sacrifice of your just rights.” “Brother? Yes; at the distance of a thousand leagues! Sisters? Yes; slaving amongst strangers! I, wealthy—gorged with gold I never earned and do not merit! You, penniless! Famous equality and fraternisation! Close union! Intimate attachment!” “But,
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre: The Original 1847 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Charlotte Brontë Classics))
when one tries to change institutions without having changed the nature of men, that unchanged nature will soon resurrect those institutions. Here was the old vicious circle; men form institutions, and institutions form men; where could change break into this ring? Voltaire and the liberals thought that intellect could break the ring by educating and changing men, slowly and peacefully; Rousseau and the radicals felt that the ring could be broken only by instinctive and passionate action that would break down the old institutions and build, at the dictates of the heart, new ones under which liberty, equality and fraternity would reign.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty, equality, fraternity.
Salman Rushdie (Shame)
What did they want, those violent man, ragged, bellowing and wild-eyed, who with clubs and pikes poured through the ancient streets of distracted Paris? They wanted to put an end to oppression, tyranny, and the sword, they wanted work for all men, education for their children, security for their wives, liberty, equality, fraternity, food enough to go round, freedom of thought, the edenization of the world. In a word they wanted progress, that hallowed, good, and gentle thing, and they demanded it in a terrible fashion with oaths on their lips and weapons in their hands. They were barbarous, yes; but barbarians in the cause of civilization.
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
Liberty, Equality and Fraternity….“ began the badger. "Liberty, Brutality and Obscenity,” rejoined the magician promptly. “You should tray living in some of the revolutions which use that slogan. First they proclaim it: then they announce that the aristos must be liquidated, on high moral grounds, in order to purge the party or to prune the commune or to make the world safe for democracy; and then they rape and murder everybody they can lay their hands on, more in sorrow than in anger, or crucify them, or torture them in ways which i do not care to mention. You should have tried the Spanish Civil War. Yes, that is equality of man. Slaughter anybody who is better than you are, and then we shall be equal soon enough. All equally dead.
T.H. White (The Once and Future King)
Now, more than ever, what is revealed is the fallacy of making individualism the organizing principle of society. What will be our new principle? We need a movement of people who know we need each other, who have a sense of responsibility to others and to the world. We need to proclaim that being kind, having faith, and working for the common good are great life goals that need courage and vigor; while glib superficiality and the mockery of ethics have done us no good. The modern era, which has developed equality and liberty with such determination, now needs to focus on fraternity with the same drive and tenacity to confront the challenges ahead. Fraternity will enable freedom and equality to take its rightful place in the symphony.
Pope Francis (Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future)
Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive. A society can be formed around two of them, but never all three. Liberty and equality, if they are strictly observed, will obliterate fraternity; equality and fraternity must extinguish liberty; and fraternity and liberty can only come at the expense of equality. If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity. With his creation of a new nobility Napoleon dispensed with that concept of equality, and instead enshrined in the French polity the concept of equality before the law in which he believed wholeheartedly.
Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
So evil is the brood of the slogans that the most splendid and noble battle cries, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, bred nothing but new and more cunning, more hypocritical despots, better organised murder, popular nationalism drunk with the conceit of hooligans, militarism as the tool of demagogues, hatred not to be assuaged by the blood of millions and a century of tears.
Joyce Cary (Except the Lord)
When you observe the enthusiasm of youth, when the cheerful hands of an innocent child reach for you, then you will sense the inner conversion; then you will realize that a new faith is awakening out of the lethargy of a corrupt epoch and taking to the march — the faith in divine justice, in heavenly truth; the faith in an unworldly, paradisiacal future, where the lust for power, force, and enmity gives way to equality and fraternity, the spirit of sacrifice, love and loyalty, and the will to stand before the throne of the Almighty with the open heart of one ready to believe in God. And they [the youth] will have sufficient greatness to stammer out the prayer for their brothers and fathers, ‘Forgive them, Lord, for they knew not what they did.
Adolf Hitler
When they are like this, I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: "The French are all right in France." What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in the colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth.
Monique Truong (The Book of Salt)
Finally, has any single man had a greater long-term impact on Europe? In France, faced with the chaos and confusion caused by the Revolution and the Terror, he quickly restored peace, political equilibrium and a strong economy; he established religious freedom, while the concordat, which he signed with Pope Pius VII in 1801, restored good relations between Church and state. He maintained low prices for the basic foods; and he created the Code Napoléon of 1804, which remains the basis of French civil law and that of nearly thirty other countries as well. In Europe, he left a trail of pillage and destruction; but he also spread the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity the length and breadth of the continent, where such concepts were new and challenging indeed.
John Julius Norwich (A History of France)
On Individualism: "Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist," Martin said with a smile. "Because I question Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I who am its avowed enemy." "Now you please to be facetious," was all the other could say. "Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality, and yet you do the work of corporations, and the corporations, from day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a socialist, because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live up to. The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight the battle against equality with the very good word on their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That is why I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and eternal foe of socialism." "But you frequent socialist meetings," Mr. Morse challenged. "Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any one of them knows more about sociology and all the other ologies than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have been to half a dozen of their meetings, but that doesn't make me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a Republican." "I can't help it," Mr. Morse said feebly, "but I still believe you incline that way.
Jack London (Martin Eden)
They wanted an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress; and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization.
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men, who in the early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling, wild, with uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves upon ancient Paris in an uproar, what did they want? They wanted an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress; and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization. They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of night. Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on demeanor and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the death penalty, of war, glorifying in low tones and with politeness, the sword, the stake, and the scaffold. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.
Victor Hugo
Christianity was preached just on the basis of the fascination of this fanaticism, and that is what made it so attractive to the Greek and the Roman slaves. They believed that under the millennial religion there would be no more slavery, that there would be plenty to eat and drink; and, therefore, they flocked round the Christian standard. Those who preached the idea first were of course ignorant fanatics, but very sincere. In modern times this millennial aspiration takes the form of equality--of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This is also fanaticism. True
Vivekananda (Karma Yoga: The Yoga of action (art of living))
The Masonic philosophy embodied the political movement under way in America to promote individual liberty and establish a broad-based national identity that encouraged fraternity and equality. Masonic ideals helped the young nation to move beyond the familiar model of a hereditary monarchy and stratified aristocracy exemplified by England. It advocated a meritocracy, in which all people were regarded as equal in the eyes of God and under the law, and they were free to develop themselves to the highest degree to which they aspired, and for which they were willing to work.
James Wasserman (The Secrets of Masonic Washington: A Guidebook to Signs, Symbols, and Ceremonies at the Origin of America's Capital)
Nietzsche attacks violently the ideas of 1789: liberty, equality, fraternity, and that meant of course liberalism, and democracy, and socialism, and communism, and anarchism. [...] [B]ut Nietzsche also rejects the conservatives, and this is only a defensive position which, because it is only defensive, is being eroded and has no future. What remained on the political plane? What remained? Superman. But what is the political meaning of superman? So whatever one may say against Marx, [against] the way from Marx to practical Marxist politics (including Lenin), is very simple. But there is no clear way leading from Nietzsche, who touches all political hot irons with the greatest gaiety, one could almost say [that] this did not lead anywhere.
Leo Strauss (Leo Strauss on Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil)
To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.
Russell Kirk (Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution)
The sexual segregation of the labour force, and the preservation of workplaces as arenas for fraternal solidarity, have remained remarkably stable during the twentieth century.59 Most women can find paid employment only in a narrow range of low-status, low-paid occupations, where they work alongside other women and are managed by men, and, despite equal-pay legislation, they earn less than men. Marriage thus remains economically advantageous for most women. Moreover, the social pressures for women to become wives are as compelling as the economic. Single women lack a defined and accepted social place; becoming a man’s wife is still the major means through which most women can find a recognized social identity. More fundamentally, if women exercised their freedom to remain single on a large scale, men could not become husbands – and the sexual contract would be shaken.
Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract)
There is, it seems to me, one sign by which you can know whether the people are or are not dupes. Examine religion and the priest, and see whether the priest is the instrument of religion, or religion the instrument of the priest. If the priest is the instrument of religion, if his only thought is to disseminate its morality and its benefits on the earth, he will be gentle, tolerant, humble, charitable, and full of zeal; his life will reflect that of his divine model; he will preach liberty and equality among men, and peace and fraternity among nations; he will repel the allurements of temporal power, and will not ally himself with that which, of all things in this world, has the most need of restraint; he will be the man of the people, the man of good advice and tender consolations, the man of public opinion, the man of the Evangelist. If, on the contrary, religion is the instrument of the priest, he will treat it as one does an instrument which is changed, bent and twisted in all ways so as to get out of it the greatest possible advantage for one’s self.
Frédéric Bastiat (The Bastiat Collection (LvMI))
As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-compaceny, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thingbeing done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State--then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion--then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, beacuse we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.
Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)
First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To share it. The first problem contains the question of labor. The second contains the question of salary. In the first problem the employment of forces is in question. In the second, the distribution of enjoyment. From the proper employment of forces results public power. From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness. By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood. From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity. Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great. England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters. Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it. The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The two problems must be combined and made but one. …Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust, mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal, so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.
Hugo
By this time the Vietnam War was such a confusing issue to most Americans that Nixon could take as many positions as he liked and find support somewhere for them all. Roughly equal numbers wanted to expand the war as negotiate a peace.
Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy (The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity)
The theory postulates that for opposite-sex fraternal twins, the higher level of prenatal testosterone in the amniotic fluid from the male fetus increases the pre-birth testosterone exposure of the female fetus. This results in a masculinization of the female twin. In general, women tend to be more risk averse than men. If this transfer theory and prenatal testosterone exposure theory are correct, then the female twin of a female-male pair should take more financial risk than other women, all else equal.
John R. Nofsinger (The Psychology of Investing)
What is at stake at the present great turning point? An individualistic worldview is being replaced by a socialistic one! A thousand-year-old attitude toward life is being thrust aside by completely new concepts. “Such a change cannot be decreed by legislation! Nor can it be brought about by a ministry, no matter how homogeneously it is put together and how saturated and filled it is with the new ideas. “Such a transformation requires an inner conversion! A mental, a spiritual, an ethical, even a religious one! … “It is such a far-reaching and complete conversion that the adult is no longer capable of it. Only youth can be converted, newly aligned and adjusted to the socialist sense of obligation toward the community… “…when you observe the enthusiasm of youth, when the cheerful hands of an innocent child reach for you, then you will sense the inner conversion; then you will realize that a new faith is awakening out of the lethargy of a corrupt epoch and taking to the march — the faith in divine justice, in heavenly truth; the faith in an unworldly, paradisiacal future, where the lust for power, force, and enmity gives way to equality and fraternity, the spirit of sacrifice, love and loyalty, and the will to stand before the throne of the Almighty with the open heart of one ready to believe in God. And they [the youth] will have sufficient greatness to stammer out the prayer for their brothers and fathers, ‘Forgive them, Lord, for they knew not what they did.’ “It is on this basis alone that the new world can be built! To lay this groundwork is our task. Our own hopes can aim no further. We must leave some things to be done by those who come after us. Your work will be a signpost for the future, a witness to our great intention, but in our time it will not be crowned with realization.” He fell silent. His inner enthusiasm had driven the blood into his cheeks. His eyes glowed like bright lights. I thought of Strasser, of our plans. And I felt: Our thinking is so puny.
Otto Wagener (Hitler: Memoirs Of A Confidant)
Excerpts from unpublished records like these show that Hitler was inspired by purely Darwinian beliefs – the survival of the fittest, with no use for the moral comfort that sound religious teaching can purvey. ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity are the grandest nonsense,’ he had said that evening. ‘Because liberty automatically precludes equality – as liberty leads automatically to the advancement of the healthier, the better, and the more proficient, and thus there is no more equality.
David Irving (The War Path)
creedal, built around the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity
Francis Fukuyama (Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment)
On November 29, 1860, Thanksgiving, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, one of the most influential Southern preachers, gave one of the most polemic proslavery secession sermons ever, which became one a Confederate propaganda tool: “Some 50,000 copies of that sermon were printed in pamphlet form and circulated throughout the South. That pamphlet became a most powerful part of Southern propaganda.” Palmer thundered against abolitionists, particularly Northern ministers, equating them to atheists and French Revolution radicals: Last of all, in this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. . . . These self- constituted reformers must quicken the activity of Jehovah or compel his abdication. . . . This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner- cry rings out already upon the air— “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted mean bondage, confiscation and massacre. . . . To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth.
Steven Dundas
On November 29, 1860, Thanksgiving, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, one of the most influential Southern preachers, gave one of the most polemic proslavery secession sermons ever, which became one a Confederate propaganda tools: “Some 50,000 copies of that sermon were printed in pamphlet form and circulated throughout the South. That pamphlet became a most powerful part of Southern propaganda.”5 Palmer thundered against abolitionists, particularly Northern ministers, equating them to atheists and French Revolution radicals: Last of all, in this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. . . . These self- constituted reformers must quicken the activity of Jehovah or compel his abdication. . . . This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner- cry rings out already upon the air— “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted mean bondage, confiscation and massacre. . . . To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth.
Steven Dundas
Blood & Sand by Stewart Stafford Enduring to be burned, bound, beaten, And to die by the sword if necessary; Verus and Priscus entered the arena, To stain Colosseum sand with blood. Emperor Titus drained Nero's lake, Built the vast Flavian Amphitheatre, Panacea to the idle citizens of Rome, Symbol of his beneficence and might. Priscus, far from his Germanian home, Fighting within a symbol of Rome's power, Which ravaged his life and fatherland, For them to decide if he is free or dies. Verus, the hulking, bullish Murmillo; Trained to deliver heavy punishment, Priscus - lightly-armed, agile Thracian; Primed to avoid his rival's huge blows. Titus showed he was Nero's antithesis; No hoarding of tracts of primo Roma, In a profligate orgy of narcissistic pride, Nor taking his own life to escape execution. Domitian, the brother of Titus, watched in envy, The emperor-in-waiting who favoured Verus, And the direct Murmillo style of fighting, Titus favoured Thracian counter-punching. Aware of the patriarchal fraternity's preferences, The gathering looked on in fascinated awe, As their champions of champions clashed, Deciding who was the greatest gladiator of all. Titus had stated there would be no draw; One would win, and one would perish, A rudis freedom staff the survivor's trophy, Out the Porta Sanavivaria - the Gate of Life. One well aware of the other, combat began, Scared eyes locked behind helmeted grilles, Grunts and sweat behind shield and steel, Roars and gasps of the clustered chorus. For hour after hour, they attacked and feinted, Using all their power, skill and technique, Nothing could keep them from a stalemate; The warriors watered and slightly rested. The search for the coup de grâce went on, Until both men fell, in dusty exhaustion, Each raised a finger, in joint submission, Equals on death's stage yielded in unison. Titus faced a dilemma; mercy or consistency? Please the crowd, but make them aware, Of his Damoclean life-and-death sword, Over every Roman and slave in the empire. Titus cleaved the Rudis into a dual solution; Unable to beat the other, both won and lived, Limping, scarred heroes of baying masses, None had ever seen a myth form before them. It was Romulus fighting Remus in extremis, Herculean labours of a sticky, lethal afternoon, In the end, nothing could separate these brothers; Victors united as Castor and Pollux in Gemini. For life and limb on Rome's vast stage, Symbiotic compensation of adulation's rage. Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved
Stewart Stafford
Our epoch of apparent indifference is the beginning of the greatest crisis of religion and morality which has struck humanity since it has begun to think. Even politics is touched; to the celebrated formula which summarizes the secular Christianity of the Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, we respond: Determinism, Inequality, Selection!
Georges Vacher De Lapouge
Opponents of Vichy’s “national revolution” faced a wave of state terror during the Tan Robé—Creole for “Robert’s Time.” (Casimir Fanon fell under suspicion as a member of the Freemasons.) “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” the motto on the facade of the Schœlcher Library, where Fanon would go to read, was changed to “Work, Family, Fatherland,” the Vichyite catechism.
Adam Shatz (The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon)
In its extreme Stalinist form the Russian megamachine betrayed, even before Hitler, the most sinister defects of the ancient megamachine: its reliance upon physical coercion and terrorism, its systematic enslavement of the entire working population, including members of the dictatorial party, its suppression of free personal intercourse, free travel, free access to the existing store of knowledge, free association, and finally its imposition of human sacrifice to appease the wrath and sustain the life of its terrible, blood-drinking God, Stalin himself. The result of this system was to transform the entire country into a prison, part concentration camp, part extermination laboratory, from which the only hope of escape was by death. The 'liberty, fraternity, and equality' of the French Revolution had turned, by a further revolution around the same axle, into alienation, inequality, and enslavement.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Never do the eyes of the devil shine as much as when he hears the words: liberty, equality, fraternity.
Klonovsky
The principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy. Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty, would kill individual initiative”.12a
M. Laxmikanth (Indian Polity)
One by one, Napoleon's armies toppled the ancient monarchies of Europe. The French believed the great ideals of their Republic-liberty, equality, and fraternity-were universal and should, if necessary, be imposed by force.
David S. Kidder (The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Culture (The Intellectual Devotional Series))
Equality is a receding dream. No level playing fields exist. With apologies to the great Jean Jacques Rousseau, man is not born free. Equality between human beings is impossible, although they could achieve a measure of fraternity.
K. Natwar Singh (One Life Is Not Enough)
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," [...] the intellectuals, could not make anything out of the uttered words in their abstractness; did not note the contradiction of their meaning and inter- relation: did not see that in nature there is no equality, cannot be freedom; that Nature herself has established inequality of minds, of characters, and capacities, just as immutably as she has established subordination to her laws
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
In her brilliant study 'The Politics of the Veil', Joan Scott pulled the veil aside to show us what it concealed in French politics. The veil conceals the presence and durability of racial hierarchies the French insist are absent. The veil conceals the haunting resemblance of the treatment of French Muslims to the treatment of French Jews. The veil shrouds a colonial past the French insist is dead and gone. Scott spreads out that much-vexed piece of cloth and uses it to map the anxieties haunting French politics and society. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are not only the core values of France-they also are demands that the French (like other Westerners) find difficult to satisfy. Liberty becomes more manageable when it is reduced to sexual freedom. The persistence of colonial hierarchies abroad and racism at home haunts the aspiration to Equality. Fraternity is lost in the conflicts over the veil and those suburbs called the banlieues d'Islam. Once again, a seemingly Muslim question reveals itself as a series of questions the West obliquely asks itself.
Anne Norton (On the Muslim Question)
People want certainty and experts provide some appearance of that certainty. The problem for the old communist states was that they were unable to move into the postmodernist world in the same way capitalist states had. They were still building tractors and talking in the tonnage of iron being produced, even while capitalist society had moved on to the information age, an age defined more by consumption than by production. And so, young intellectuals in East Germany are discussed, since they felt they wanted to leave, not because they were unhappy with their state supplied doctor – but because in post-modern times, one is defined by the choices one makes – and where there are no choices, there is no identity either. This runs the whole way down. He constructs a dualism between seduction and surveillance (Foucault’s panopticon). He says that the main force of social regulation now is seduction. At least this is true for those who matter in society. They are seduced by products – their need to buy is generated by their need to assert and create their own identity – and so, we are all constantly seduced by the images of what we could become if only we added this one more item to our store. For those who are at the bottom of society, all that is available to them is the minimum necessary to keep their body and soul together. And so, these people must be watched to ensure they do not try anything that might otherwise damage social harmony. Bauman doesn’t say this here, but since these people are essentially failed consumers, all they really want is access to the same kinds of products the comparatively wealthy enjoy, products that would enable them to also construct their own identities. When there were riots in England in 2011, for example, as others have said – including Bauman, I believe – the precariat did not seek to tear down the system, they broke into department stores and stole shoes and wide-screen televisions. The revolution was not a call for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – but Gucci, Chanel, Calvin Klein.
Trevor on Intimations of Postmodernity by Zygmunt Bauman
So, the Sandinistas are going to win?" "Win what?" "Well," he was confused, "the election." "If there's an election in this country, babe, don't blink or you'll miss the whole show." "But the elections are scheduled," he said. "The elections are going to take place." "They're not going to let anybody vote. They'll postpone it again and they'll blame the U.S." "I don't believe you." "Why would they risk losing? Why would they let go of all the power once they had it?" "Because they believe in principles. Because those principles would grow stronger. If they chanced losing that power in the name, if they played fair in the name," he said, "of certain principles." "Like what principles? Let's hear these names." "Equality. Democracy." "Liberty, fraternity. Right. Yeah. Right." "Why am I talking to you?" he said bitterly.
Denis Johnson (The Stars at Noon)
A state/country based on freedom, equality and fraternity is not only possible but inevitable in the long run.
Tayyib Ahmad Tayyib (The Ideal State: A Model Based on Analysis of Savagery, Feudalism, Capitalism and Beyond)
loss of respect for logic to which we owe so many disasters that the French Revolution made equality and fraternity co-ordinates.
Richard M. Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences)
Fraternity directs attention to others, equality to self; and the passion for equality is simultaneous with the growth of egotism.
Richard M. Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences)
The ideals of Fraternity and Equality were joined with that of Liberty and the three were accepted
William Roscoe Thayer (Theodore Roosevelt; an Intimate Biography)
But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial, the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened! There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the head of the king—and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey. And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected, which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing; these things became the established order and nature of appointed things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old. Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world—the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.
Charles Dickens
In modern times this millennial aspiration takes the form of equality--of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This is also fanaticism. True equality has never been and never can be on earth.
Vivekananda (Karma Yoga: The Yoga of action (art of living))
The seemingly worthy causes of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) were in reality the Illuminati agenda.
Frank White (The Illuminati's Greatest Hits: Deception, Conspiracies, Murders And Assassinations By The World's Most Powerful Secret Society)
Complete moral tolerance is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other—that is to say, when society is at an end.
James Fitzjames Stephen (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity)
He held his head in the manner of one who takes his beauty for granted, but knows that others do not. He was Peter Keating, star student of Stanton, president of the student body, captain of the track team, member of the most important fraternity, voted the most popular man on the campus. The crowd was there, thought Peter Keating, to see him graduate, and he tried to estimate the capacity of the hall. They knew of his scholastic record and no one would beat his record today. Oh, well, there was Shlinker. Shlinker had given him stiff competition, but he had beaten Shlinker this last year. He had worked like a dog, because he had wanted to beat Shlinker. He had no rivals today.... Then he felt suddenly as if something had fallen down, inside his throat, to his stomach, something cold and empty, a blank hole rolling down and leaving that feeling on its way: not a thought, just the hint of a question asking him whether he was really as great as this day would proclaim him to be. He looked for Shlinker in the crowd; he saw his yellow face and gold-rimmed glasses. He stared at Shlinker warmly, in relief, in reassurance, in gratitude. It was obvious that Shlinker could never hope to equal his own appearance or ability; he had nothing to doubt; he would always beat Shlinker and all the Shlinkers of the world; he would let no one achieve what he could not achieve. Let them all watch him. He would give them good reason to stare. He felt the hot breaths about him and the expectation, like a tonic. It was wonderful, thought Peter Keating, to be alive.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
Liberty, fraternity, and equality, as they are now sprouting up everywhere — they have brought about evil in a thousand abuses, and will continue to do so.
Johann Gottfried Herder
It is like the values which kept the fire of the French Revolution going. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. And JKs! Although this time around, the JK has a pretty good K/D ratio. Just like the French Revolution.
Onii sanbomber (I Met You After the End of the World (Light Novel) Volume 1)
The French Revolution is in its second year, and the new legislative assemblies in Paris are caught in a contradiction between their professed ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the continuing obscenity of colonial slavery. Such contradictions play havoc in Saint-Domingue among the twenty thousand or so whites, as royalists fight republicans, and with the thirty thousand free mulattoes demanding full political rights. M.
C.L.R. James (Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts (The C. L. R. James Archives))
They had the same saying as Americans: “Les affaires sont les affaires”—business is business. When you said that, you set moral considerations aside as irrelevant; the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God were idle dreams; liberty, equality, and fraternity were bait to catch votes; the only question was, did you have the price?
Upton Sinclair (Dragon Harvest (The Lanny Budd Novels))
The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)
Ward Farnsworth (Farnsworth's Classical English Style (Farnsworth's Classical English series Book 3))
Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)
Ward Farnsworth (Farnsworth's Classical English Style (Farnsworth's Classical English series Book 3))
[Nineteenth-century professional women's] end was pertinent and and timely--economic independence. To achieve that end, they upheld, unconsciously as often as consciously, women's most vivid tricolor: freedom of work, equality in the rewards of work, fraternity in trade and in profession. And though, with such a feather pinned to their jaunty caps, they fought the bloodless revolution of the nineteenth century, their contemporaries and sometimes themselves were unaware of what they had accomplished.
Madeleine B. Stern (We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America)