Life & Wisdom Quote by Bryant H. McGill

A line like this lands less as prophecy than as provocation: not a measured claim that equality is hard, but an accusation that America keeps mistaking the word for the thing. McGill frames “American society” as a single actor, which is rhetorically unfair on purpose. It forces the reader to feel implicated, even if they believe themselves enlightened. The phrase “never completely” is the pressure point: it dodges an easily disproved absolute while still sounding bleak. There’s always progress, the sentence concedes, but always a remainder - a moral debt the culture can’t quite pay off.

The subtext is that the U.S. has turned equality into branding: a civic self-image (“land of opportunity”) that survives by redefining the terms. Equality becomes sameness (treat everyone identically), or access (let people compete), or symbolism (representation), while sidestepping the messier question of power: who is protected, believed, policed, promoted, and forgiven. “True meaning” signals an appeal to something deeper than law - an ethic of equal human worth that should show up in outcomes and daily interactions, not just in constitutional slogans.

Context matters: McGill is a contemporary self-help and social commentary writer, not a policy theorist. That gives the line its bluntness. It’s designed to travel - quotable, shareable, morally clarifying. The risk is the same: by speaking as if “society” is a single mind that “understands,” it can flatten real debates and hard-won gains. Still, the sentence works because it refuses the comforting story that equality is a solved idea, and instead treats it as a continual moral literacy test America keeps failing.