Quotes About Entitlement

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.

As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners.

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement. The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what they have is not true compensation and therefore not completely theirs.

So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous. Those who are entitled to knowledge feel they should be granted property as well, and those who are entitled to property believe a certain knowledge goes with it. Scholars demand higher salaries for their publishable successes; industrialists sit on university boards.

Under all wrong-doing lies personal vanity or the feeling that we are endowed and privileged beyond our fellows.

he had an indefinable look of privilege gone wrong

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point I am entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere

Entitlement, I have told them, is a matter of feeling like we rather than they.

I feel I deserve a little amusement at someone else's expense. That is all. I have worked for it. I have paid for it. And I propose to have it.

He held her eyes and said clearly, 'You have a great deal to be responsible for.' 'She gave you birth,' Richard said. 'That was her first mistake. The next was to spoil you. So that everything you want, you must have immediately.

he found the idea of someone who was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the world didn't really understand the problems of privileged people, deeply obnoxious.

and they've concluded that our democratic system is an abject failure. And they think we Americans are weak, lazy, whiny, self-important global has-beens, inflated with a false sense of entitlement. In this, they are probably correct.

The greatest benefits will not bind the ungrateful.

None but those who work are entitled to eat.

People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something.

the world is full of the young – or even the middle-aged – who wait, patiently or impatiently, for the death of someone whose decease will give them if not affluence – then opportunity

Flora is like all these young girls nowadays, with no veneration for their betters and thinking they know best on every subject under the sun,

Like all men, he was a spoilt child; he expected everybody to make a fuss of him.

To be heir to the throne is not a position; it is a predicament.

If everything is a matter of opinion, and if everybody is entitled to his own opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion.

GRATITUDE is intellectually compelling and it is a very good trait—so why are we so often ungrateful? There are two reasons for this. The first is that a person's first impression is that everything comes by itself, and that it is all coming to him. The other reason is: when I receive good from someone and I recognize that good, I became indebted to him. —RABBI SHLOMO WOLBE (1914–2005)

Both figuratively and literally, entitled people expect your signature on the front of the checks, and theirs on the back.