Best 538 quotes in «privilege quotes» category

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.

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)

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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 you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.

If my mother will not go to heaven, I renounce the privilege

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?

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.

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 you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege.

If you have to stretch that far to reach the justification you want, then perhaps you’re standing upon the wrong pedestal.

I'm starting to realize that being born into this social world is a little like being born into clean air. You take it in as soon as you breathe, and pretty soon you don't even realize that while you can walk around with clear lungs, other people are wearing oxygen masks just to survive.

I get it, you know. I'm operating on privilege too. It may be a number of notches down from yours but it's every bit as unearned. I think the trick is to never forget it.

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

I have the impression that our children are much more excited about going to school than children in other countries are. They think of it as a special privilege. Going to school, being with other children, getting books and pencils - all of that is like a dream for them.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

...I have a theory about why and how all this has happened to you. Instead of having to earn it, you have been handed the presidency, the same way you've come by everything else in your life. Money and name alone have opened every door for you. Without effort or hard work or intelligence, or ingenuity, you have been bequeathed a life of privilege...So it's no wonder you think you deserved to be named President. You didn't earn it or win it- therefore it must be yours!

I have to be honest with myself. When I write as an outsider, I am also an insider in so many ways. I am university-educated, able-bodied, and I speak and write in ways very similar to those I criticise. I walk and talk like them, and part of that is why I am taken seriously. As I write about shattering perspectives and disrupting faux objectivity, I have to remember that there are factors in my life that bolster my voice above others.

In the past, he had never questioned the fact that he was a prince; like the fact that he was the child of his mother and father, it seemed like something that would never change. Yet look how easily he had lost that rank and privilege! A person's fortune could turn at any time.

In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter -- for they structure the limitations of their lives -- are locked out of the discussion.

I never knew, until I came here, that my background could be something to apologize for. That these privileges were so randomly given to me, while other people were just as randomly denied...Privilege has begun to feel like and inescapable infection. I carry its implications with me, and my desire to understand how it works only seems to underscore it.

In the court of Madoka, people who preyed on and stole from the poor and helpless deserved to be buried from the neck down and left to die in the desert while the birds picked out their eyes.

I saw what was happening, the way my privilege was shielding me from the more unpleasant elements of the process, and a part of me recognized that it was wrong to quietly and gratefully accept this protection. Another, stronger part of me was fine with this. I was too scared to choose fairness over my being able to avoid being fingerprinted or having to wait for hours alone in a cell while my case was processed.

Inviting someone to work for pay is a sacred privilege and a trust. It must be regarded a high honor to be able to give another person work, and neither employer nor employee should abuse this relationship

Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’ ‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denying that.’ Captain Chillingworth’s words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a deep well of bitterness. ‘I am sure it will do a great deal of good for some of us. But I doubt I’ll be of that number, or that many Chinamen will. The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.

It contained a sad, but too common story of the hard-heartedness of the wealthy, and the misery endured by the children of the highborn. Blood is not water, it is said, but gold with them is dearer far than the ties of nature; to keep and augment their possessions being the aim and end of their lives, the existence, and, more especially, the happiness of their children, appears to them a consideration at once trivial and impertinent, when it would compete with family views and family greatness. To this common and and iniquitous feeling these luckless beings were sacrificed; they had endured the worst, and could be injured no more; but their orphan child was a living victim, less thought of than the progeny of the meanest animal which might serve to augment their possessions. Mrs. Baker felt some complacency on reading this letter; with the common English respect for wealth and rank, she was glad to find that her humble roof had sheltered a man who was the son — she did not exactly know of whom, but of somebody, who had younger sons and elder sons, and possessed, through wealth, the power of behaving frightfully ill to a vast number of persons.