Quotes About Entitlement

We're so used to getting everything we want now, my generation.

W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.

I'm trying to help you. I never asked for help my whole life. I want what I'm owed.

If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. (Cats may sometimes share the cold entrails of a kill with you, but this is just what a god might do if he was in a good mood.)

Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience, that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming the appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either.

He's acting as foolish as a kitten... but then, everyone's entitled to a little foolishness once in a while.

In short, if one is entitled to everything, then one is thankful for nothing.

He had managed to get the good things in life, somehow—but why at least could he not go off and enjoy them, without coming to taunt the poor with their misfortune?

Citizenship, after all, is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities—and they don't worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges.1

I know that now, in the world today, young people take freedom for granted. All the things you have, all of the freedoms you enjoy, they are things you were born with.

It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect--and shame comes when you lose that title--a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.

Something for nothing is worth nothing...

However, not everyone who was entitled to an elaborate funeral received one. When Jane Seymour died in 1537, a fortnight after the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII made strenuous attempts to restrict extravagant mourning.

I don't have a sense of entitlement or that I deserve this. You'd be surprised at the lack of competition between nominees I think a lot of it's imposed from the outside. Can I have my champagne now?

At the very bottom of human experience comes a set of certain privileges, a special zone where the rules apply to everyone else except you. It was good of the world to build itself that way, and include that tiny consolation prize for those who have nothing else to recommend their lives in that moment. The

Some who deserve failure do not achieve it," he sniffed. "Some who deserve nothing are given the world.

It's easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.

Doesn't sound like anyone cares about Rightful until they want to kick someone else out of the chair.

They want only their private toys and candies, and will not share.

Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn't mean that you're lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.

Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an "absence of knowledge" but "an active state of repelling knowledge," embroiled in the statement, "Well, I don't see race" where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

am an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid, imposing all my own insecurities onto him. I can't even recall if I actually felt that pain or imagined it, since I have rewritten this memory so many times I have mauled it down to nothing, erasing him down until he was a smudge of resentment while I was a smudge of entitlement until we both smudged into me.

That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.