Quotes About Privilege

The difference between growing up like me and growing up like Will was that wore his sense of entitlement lightly. I think if you grow up like he had done, with wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants as a matter of course, you just have this sense that good things will fall into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one.

Once we were all the same, you know? Now they say I can never know what their problems are. Because I am rich. Somehow I am not allowed to have problems. Or they are strange around me, like I am somehow different person. Like the good things in my life are an insult to others.

Beautiful and wealthy as she was, I felt a little sorry for her. I thought she probably wouldn't realize what she had lost until it was much too late.

2. Focus on "Get To" instead of "Have To.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

Everyone knew the draft was rigged to protect wealthy white men from service, while the poor and dark-skinned served in disproportionately high numbers, he said

King's calm tone and conservative attire may have disguised the boldness of his words: "I think it's better to be aggressive at this point," he said. "It seems to me that it is both historically and sociologically true that privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily. And they do not give them up without strong resistance.

I looked over and saw the palsied children battling with their food. No amount of exposure to the members of the privileged class was going to bring them membership in the Yacht Club, an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Upper Crust Debutante Ball of San Marino, or a Mercedes in the garage.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

The rich leapt over suspicious puddles in their beautiful clothes. Up and down they strolled, no discernible destination in mind, and that, he [Andrew Haswell Green] decided, must be a thing that money can buy: the freedom from needing direction.

It seems the only sin Patrick could be talking about is homicide. Perhaps in a moment of rage or carelessness, the young Patrick impulsively killed one of the slaves who worked the family's lands. He could get away with it: after all, he was the son of the lord of the manor. But as time went on—and he found himself in the position of slave, his heart changed by the love of God—the gravity of his crime dawned on him.

Say there's a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter - for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that's saying is that he's living a fantasy life of rebellion.

Philosophical intelligence is never so truthful, pure, and precise as when it starts from oppression and does not have any privileges to defend, because it has none at all.

Though we might like to think so, humankind is not at any special, unique or privileged location in the gargantuan, perhaps infinite, Universe.

If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps.

The term "noblesse oblige"—the idea that those who have been blessed with much are to use it to help those who have not been so blessed—would not be coined for another half-century, and Wilberforce had yet to discover the relevance of any such idea to his own life.

Every free-born American has a right to name his own necessities.

No system which implies control by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

When done right, it is a privilege to get picked up by a pick up artist.

As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.

In June, 1864, a Texan summed up with striking aptness the Rebel clothing situation. "In this army," he wrote from near Atlanta, "one hole in the seat of the breeches indicates a captain, two holes a lieutenant, and the seat of the pants all out indicates that the individual is a private.

THE TROUBLE with the old boy network is you can never be really sure whether it's switched on or not and whether it's operating in your interest or some other old boy's.

Yes," I said, because you can't show weakness to posh people or they'll mercilessly take advantage. I think it's something they learn at school in between conversational French and practical condescension.