Equality of rights means that some people cannot simply impose obligations on others, for the moral agency and rights of those others would then be violated. – Tom G. Palmer

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards. – Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950