Best 538 quotes in «privilege quotes» category

Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.

Anytime the rich and poor combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power. Rich people are conditioned to assess the world through our privileges. The powerful tend to discredit or ignore the marginalized perspective because we can. We are shielded from the effects of a lopsided equation; we reap the benefits, not the losses. We don't mean to do this (or even know we do), but we evaluate other communities through the lens of advantage assuming we know best, have the most to offer. In doing so we unintentionally elevate our perception.

Apologies for the White Privilege. I can't help it.

As difficult an environment as the DA's Office could be, I saw no overarching conspiracy against women. The unequal treatment was usually more a matter of old habits dying hard.

A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.

As outraged as I am by Trump’s actions since his inauguration, I know there’s no objective truth regarding how well he has performed in his first 100 days as president. We each view Trump’s presidency through lenses of privilege — lenses that are only begrudgingly relinquished, if we’re willing and able to relinquish them at all. When privilege is perpetuated and protected by the president, those clinging to their privilege praise him. When privilege is threatened, the opposite occurs. Those who felt their privilege was threatened under Obama elected a president who promised to restore it. -- From "The Challenge of Staying Hopeful in the Age of Trump," The Advocate, April 28, 2017

As writers we have been given the great privilege to create something that gives people a space to explore who they are.” —@brownbookworm

Be open to the evolution of you, as every day we are presented with the privilege to celebrate a re-birth.

Being able to live without having to be defined by your skin color is the hallmark of privilege.

Being privileged doesn't mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.

At the center of this worldview is the evil of oppression, the virtue of “marginalized” identities—based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or disability—and the perfectionist quest to eliminate anything the marginalized may perceive as oppressive or “invalidating.” Such perceptions are given a near-absolute presumption of validity, even if shared by a fraction of the “oppressed group.” Meanwhile, the viewpoints of the “privileged”—a category that includes economically disadvantaged whites, especially men—are radically devalued.

Being different entails consequences but I like to think they're privileges.

But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.

But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside.

...but you’ve been a fool. Some women take advantage. Once they’re married, and they’ve got a good husband, they think they can do what they like. And if they take him for granted-” she paused significantly- “they just don’t bother anymore.

Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Even in the face of powerful structures of domination, it remains possible for each of us, especially those of us who are members of oppressed and/or exploited groups as well as those radical visionaries who may have race, class, and sex privilege, to define and determine alternative standards, to decide on the nature and extent of compromise.

Claiming to be a victim gives people perverse authority. Subjective experience becomes key: 'I am a sexual abuse victim. I am allowed to speak on this. You are not because you have never experienced what it is like to be...'. Victim status can buy special privileges and gives the green light to brand opposing views or even mild criticisms as tantamount to hate speech. So councils, who have become chief cheerleaders for policing subjective complaints, define hate speech as including 'any behavior, verbal abuse or insults, offensive leaflets, posters, gestures as perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by hostility, prejudice or hatred'. This effectively incites 'victims' to shout offense and expect a clamp-down. Equally chilling, if a victim aggressively accuses you of offense, it is dangerous to argue back, or even to request that they should stop being so hostile, should you be accused of 'tone policing', a new rule that dictates: '[Y]ou can never question the efficacy of anger ... when voiced by a person from a marginalized background'. No wonder people are queueing up to self-identify into any number of victim camps: you can get your voice heard loudly, close down debate and threaten critics.

Despite its cosmopolitan airs, New York manufactures its own distinctive brand of high-IQ hicks: people [...] whose comprehension of the world beyond the Hudson River is willfully nonexistent.

Duty and honor are oft enough realm only for those with security to afford them.

Everyone has a responsibility towards this larger family of man, but especially if you're privileged, that increases your responsibility." (The Power of One: Belief.net Interview; July 2005)

From those to whom privilege and opportunity are given, we have the right to expect much.

Few pretty and privileged young women really understand the essential injustice of biology...For most of her life as a woman, the rules were perfectly clear cut: other women were the enemy, and all love was war. She had rejected feminism, quite openly, as a crutch for the envious and ugly, and regarded married women as holding the upper hand if, unlike her own mother, they had any strength of character. The weaknesses and dependencies imposed by fecundity had never entered into her calculations.

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.

Favor is a special status or privilege that could granted to someone, You can call it supernatural fragrance that attracts unsolicited help.

For me, every soul has something to give, something to teach us, and it's our responsibility -- no, privilege -- to give what we can, to love when we can. -- Inanna Sharru-kinu

For the mentally disturbed, Marie knew these sandwich visits might be the only dependable moments in their lives. She also knew she delivered the sandwiches for her own sanity. Something would crumble inside of her if she ever walked by a homeless person and pretended not to notice. Or simply didn't care. In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe's share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city. The powerful white men of Seattle had created a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. That ordinance was crazier and much more evil than any homeless person. Sometimes Marie wondered if she worked so hard at anything only because she hated powerful white men. She wondered if she went to college and received good grades just because she was looking for revenge.

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

Globalism has less leeway for a poor country's brilliant sons.

Gradualism veiled as hope is all too often a balm to the privileged and a poison to the oppressed.

He’s [G.H.W. Bush] never had to do a day’s work in his life.

Happiness feels like a privilege to struggling kids, but inspiration feels like home.

Having privilege means that you have worked hard, but in a world more likely to enable, recognize, and financially reward hard work; that you have suffered, but in a world with fewer forms of suffering, with more mechanisms to prevent it, and stronger remedies when it occurs; that you are not responsible for the atrocities committed by your people in the past, but insofar as you do nothing today, you are complicit in the present created by them.

her actions taught me white people can't really get it unless they are the hero

he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

How do you explain a world that gifts evil men with privilege and wealth and looks the other way while they torment and abuse the weakest members of society?

He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgement of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. 'Yes, I see what you mean,' he said often.

Hinter dem westlichen Konzept einer Idealstadt verbirgt sich die Idee der Privilegierung. Moreau hätte ihm ohne Zweifel zugestimmt.

History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

How is it that we can punish women who are paid by politicians yet allow freedom and forgiveness to the politicians who pay them? The irony of the situation is that if we allow Sptizer’s deep pockets to buy his way back into our homes and hearts, then it’s not young women he hired who are whores, it’s the people of New York.

How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy. Maybe it was to hearken back to their seventeenth-century New England bootstraps--the manual trades that had made them stalwart and humble and virtuous in the eyes of their Lord. Or maybe it was just a way of politely understating their predestination to having it all.

I am privileged to have your illuminating presence in my life that adds etherealness to my existence!

I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers’ and mothers’ inheritances.

I can't help but marvel at the resiliency of trans people who sacrifice so much to be seen and accepted as they are. Despite those sacrifices, trans people are still wrongly viewed as being confused. It takes determination and clear, thought-out conviction, not confusion, to give up many of the privileges that Genie did to be visibly herself, though her experiences varied from my own.

I don't like it,' said Pigott. 'This is a well-established neighborhood. These families go back generations.' 'Don't all families go back generations?

I don't buy into the notion of 'privilege' at all. To even attempt to brand and shame whole swathes of people based on their race or gender is, to me, obscene. It has icky echoes of totalitarian propaganda which seeks to direct the ire of a populace at certain sections of society deemed 'unworthy.' Playing the blame game gets us nowhere.

If love is the greatest gift of all-and I believe it is- then the greatest privilege of all is to be able to love someone.

If I am privileged enough to see an upturn, I want to return here with my spirit mended; smiling at the most marvelous of scripts ever written.