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Privilege Quotes

Browse 2076 quotes about Privilege.

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Privilege Quotes

“Your brother likes to argue that the Jamaican slave revolt, failed though it was, is what impelled the British to legislate abolition. He's right, but only half right. See, the revolt won British sympathy because the leaders were part of the Baptist church, and when it failed, proslavery whites in Jamaica started destroying chapels and threatening missionaries. Those Baptists went back to England and drummed up support on the grounds of religion, not natural rights. My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care - whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can't appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.”

TrustRevolutionPrivilegeCaringSelfishRight ThingSympathy
Book:Babel
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“Willingly embracing the emptiness of the tomb is more difficult for those of us in places of privilege. We have so much “stuff,” so many activities and endless sources of distraction and busyness to fill any potential emptiness, that our pretense is better fortified against any attempts to expose it, whether through circumstance or intentionality. This is why, in part, Jesus speaks so strongly against the love of money. He did not demonize money itself, but recognized how easily we become enslaved to a different master, in bondage to mammon, instead of following Christ in loving service of God and others.”

HonestyPrivilegeVulnerabilityPretense
Book:Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick
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“And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.”

ImaginationEmpathyPrivilege
Book:Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
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“Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.”

FameWorkersPrivilegeArtistsClass StruggleNewspaper
Book:Art Young: His Life and Times
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“This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, "It's too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings." And then someone else on board says something like, "But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d'oeuvres." At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who'd been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can't get to him soon enough, or they don't even try, and the yacht's speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.”

WealthClassPovertyHistoryPrivilege
Book:There There
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“There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth--hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic--he came from money, and couldn't see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating.”

PovertyDevelopmentPrivilege
Book:At Night We Walk in Circles
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“Guilt gripped her--she was the person who determined Reina's salary, which in turn determined these conditions. But she remembered that Reina sent the bulk of her money back home to her parents. She would be able to afford a better place otherwise, surely. It was a kind of sacrifice that Nakia never had cause to make. She hoped she would be willing if circumstances called for it. Why was life so hard for some people? A question people called you stupid for asking, yet no one could give you a straightforward explanation.”

WealthPovertySacrificeGuiltPrivilegeIncomeSalaryLife Is Hard
Book:The Wilderness
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“My family won't last a month without me.' Lucien chuckled, and I gritted my teeth. 'Do you know what it's like to be hungry?' I demanded, anger rising to devour any common sense. 'Do you know what it's like to not know when your next meal will be?' Tamlin's jaw tightened. 'Your family is alive and well-cared for. You think so low of faeries that you believe I'd take their only source of income and nourishment and not replace it?”

PovertyHungerPrivilegeSarah J MaasFeyreFeyre ArcheronStarvingA Court Of Thorns And RosesTamlinLucien
Book:A Court of Thorns and Roses
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“Sure, some rich people work hard – but so do koilawalas, construction workers, and domestic helpers. Other bases of privilege have little to do with personal merit: our aptitudes, health, inheritance, social connections, and other assets derive from contingencies (such as the accident of birth) over which we have no control. Even our education reflects inherited circumstances, and our parents’ and teachers’ efforts, far more than our own. All this is without going into the fact that wealth and power often build on corruption, exploitation, and crime”

WealthPovertyPowerIndiaPrivilegePersonal Merit
Book:Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone
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“Let us just say that the idea of struggling to make my way in a world of privileged, affluent people exhausted me before I even tried: I was the child of nothing, I had neither beauty not charm, neither past nor ambition; I had not the slightest savoir-fare or sparkle. There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demands upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger.”

PhilosophyWealthPovertyHungerPrivilegeCommunism
Book:The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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“Im Kapitalismus wie im Kommunismus läuft alles (...) auf eine falsche Vorstellung hinaus, die wir vor vierzig Jahren beinahe überwunden hätten: auf den Trugschluss, ein Leben ohne Armut sei kein Recht, auf das alle Menschen Anspruch hätten, sondern ein Privileg, für das man arbeiten müsse.”

PovertyCapitalismPrivilegeCommunismRightFallacyKapitalismusRechtArmutKommunismus
Book:Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
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“Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swathes of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.”

PovertyPrivilegeAdam Parrish
Book:The Raven Boys
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“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.”

WealthPovertyPrivilege
Author:Jen Hatmaker
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“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.”

RacePovertyPowerPrivilegeRevengeFrustrationHomelessNative Americans
Book:Indian Killer
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“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.”

WealthFreedomResponsibilityMoralityPolicePrivilegeMoral Absolutism
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led.”

WealthSlaveryPrivilegeDelusion
Book:Roots: The Saga of an American Family
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“We demand the economic empowerment of the masses through an enormous redistribution of wealth from the privileged to the people. We demand a system of total social mobility i.e. we demand the complete abolition of the force obstructing social mobility: privilege. We demand that those people living on the margins, the fringes of society, be restored to the mainstream and have their dignity returned to them. Nobody people versus Somebody people. It’s time for the nobodies to win.”

WealthPrivilegeInequalityNobodySomebody
Book:The Illuminati Phalanx
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“I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence--the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he's never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger's dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted. They are arrogant, that's what I realize--maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can't touch them--just like I used to do. Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won't let go.”

WealthPrivilegeEntitlement
Book:One by One
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“The combination of outward privilege and emotional invisibility is one of the most hurtful and confusing ways to live. Nothing appears to be wrong and yet every day is a torturous maze of unreflected chaotic emotional upheaval, ameliorated only be regular descents into dorsal numbness.”

WealthMental HealthPrivilegeNumbnessInvisible SufferingSuffering Of Privilege
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We start a relationship with someone not only because of how great they are but how great they make us feel. And because they have granted us this extraordinary gift—a chance to experience love, joy, compassion, and security —it is our exclusive privilege to make them feel wonderful about themselves, especially during days when they, themselves, don't feel so wonderful.”

LoveSoulTogetherRomanceInspirational QuotesJoyLove QuotesCompassionMarriageKindnessSupportWifeWonderfulDreamsSecurityCoupleHusbandRelationship QuotesRomanticExperienceQuoteUnityExtraordinaryPrivilegeGoalsGiftGirlfriendGreatFeelingStabilityEngagementLoverSpouseSoulmateExclusiveBoyfriendKamandKojouriFeelKamand KojouriRomantic QuotesPartnerDaysLovedHopesEncourageSomeoneFall In LoveRelationsLife PartnerUpliftGrant
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“Cleopatra earned a second back-handed tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, counseled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculptures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight. Livia compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious.”

WomenHistoryPrivilegeTributeGolden AgeStatus
Book:Cleopatra: A Life
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