Quotes About Privilege

Léopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians' doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment.

At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?

All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master's glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the patrón. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same.

Clearly, our experience of choice as a burden rather than a privilege is not a simple phenomenon. Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

elite families with high connections.

Over time, though, life got complicated again and memories faded. My expectations returned, and I found the same old complaints seeping back into my daily routine. Yet always, somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice reminds me that every day is a gift, not a right. I know that to be well fed, painless, and in the company of friends and loved ones are privileges too few enjoy in this often brutal world.

Colleges and universities, meanwhile, have no such qualms about torturing their applicants. Think about how much work a high-school student must do to even be considered for a spot at a decent college. The difference in college and job applications is especially striking when you consider that a job applicant will be getting paid upon acceptance while a college applicant will be paying for the privilege to attend.

Capitalism set out as the opponent of privilege and the champion of freedom," Rauschenbusch wrote, "it has ended by being the defender of privilege and the intrenchment of autocracy.

Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their responsibilities are almost always up to no good.

Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.

If my starting offer is "I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don't get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind," I can't expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there's no good reason that I should get privileges just because I'm me and you're not.

and Twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems and in a monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy":

I love rich people. Any time I needed a job, I went to a rich person. I like poor people, but they never had a job for me.

What does America love more than one white male?

I love filmmaking, and I love the process. And I would rather do nothing else. It's a privilege to be able to paint such big pictures, so to speak.

In my travels all over the world, I have come to realize that what distinguishes one child from another is not ability, but access. Access to education, access to opportunity, access to love.

Every day, I love what I do and I think it's a gift and privilege to love your job.

My life may be a pretty crazy life at times, but its a very privileged one - being able to earn a good living doing what you love. Not many people have such an opportunity.

I mean, I'd love to have a private jet - I know people who fly by private jet all the time... I've hitched a ride a few times and it is not overrated at all; it's a great way to travel!

When I treat other people with kindness and love, it is part of my way of paying my debt to God and the world for the privilege of living on this planet.

Even though Jesus took on flesh for my sake, whiteness prevents me from knowing how to live in my own skin.

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

The poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. They are also much more susceptible to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.