Lenin: Engels was a thousand times right when he wrote that to conceive equality as meaning anything beyond the abolition of classes is a very stupid and absurd prejudice. Bourgeois professors have tried to make use of the concept of equality to accuse us of wanting to make all men equal to one another. They have tried to accuse the socialists of this absurdity, which they themselves invented. But in their ignorance they did not know that the socialists — and precisely the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels — said: Equality is an empty phrase unless equality is understood to mean the abolition of classes. We want to abolish classes, and in this respect we stand for equality. But the claim that we want to make all men equal to one another is an empty phrase and a stupid invention of intellectuals. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3012