Hi SD,
I’ve been looking for a quotation. I don’t know what exactly it is or who said it, but I know the gist of the quote. The important point it was making was that “the surest sign that we are all equal is that we all think we’re better than everyone else.”
I always liked this idea. Everyone thinks they’re superior to those other idiots. In the end, that’s something we have in common. Can anyone tell me who said it?
Thanks,
Dave
Not quite the same:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that.”
George Carlin
There’s many variations on “fifty percent of all people are below average” - but that’s not the same as the OP’s question.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it expressed that way, though.
Wikiquote at www.wikiquote.org is an online resource for looking up quotes. I entered your quote at Wikiquote and did not get a clear match. I also searched Wikiquote for terms like “democracy and superiority”, “democracy and inferiority”, “democracy equality”, etc. Alexis DeTocqueville is often quoted from his book Democracy in America so that might be a good source, unless you think the quote is more current day.
Here are a few that might be of interest:
“There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”
Alexis DeTocqueville in Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (1835) (Alexis de Tocqueville - Wikiquote)
Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett is a resource in print (and online by subscription) that can help find quotations. Bartlett’s 15th print edition had these potential matches:
“To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of comfortable feeling of superiority too the masses of one’s fellow men, and (c) delicately and increasingly amused according to one’s taste, It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am - a man of my peculiar weakeness, affinities, appetites, and aversions - can be so happy as he can be in the United States.”
Henry Louis Mecken (1880-1956) in On Being an American.
“Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal”
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in Politics
“Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.”
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in Politics
“Democracy cannot be saved by supermen, but only by the unswerving devotion and goodness of millions of little men.”
Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1900-1965) in Speech [1955]
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” Elwyn Brooks White (1899-) in The Wild Flag (1946).