Quotes About Privilege

Same-sex marriage isn't a gay privilege, it's equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don't.

I believe the greatest privilege in this world is to use your freedom of speech for those who have no voice.

In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued.

Under President Josiah Quincy, Harvard turned its back on the citizenry as a whole to focus on the sons of the Hub's wealthy merchants and financiers.

Do you consider yourself a helpful person?" Following brief reflection, nearly everyone answered yes. In that privileged moment—after subjects had confirmed privately and affirmed publicly their helpful natures—the researchers pounced, requesting help with their survey. Now 77.3 percent volunteered.

Don't believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they're born into.

Being rich now means having enough money that you don't have to encounter anyone who isn't.

Commitments to social responsibility are also conveniently reassuring to talented or privileged young people who want to do good while also doing well, and who don't want to acknowledge the cruel joke that, as Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has pointed out, people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has written, "The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions," while accusing the underprivileged of "lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.

Socialism for the Rich, Harsh Capitalism for the Rest

The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can't, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

What starts as gratitude quickly becomes dependency and ends as entitlement

growing strong from adversity is mostly a luxury for those who are better off.

regardless of the market, the rich are always offered private investments that are not offered to the general public.

but the best deals are closed to most people, even though they have money.

Olive never had to wear flannel petticoats. Olive wore ruffled silk and sheer lawn and filmy laced flounces. But Olive's father had 'married money' and Olive never had Bronchitis. So there you were.

Why do you like Hugh better? Because he is a Viscount?' 'Well, that's one reason,' I admitted, without any false shame. Respect for degree was in my blood and I didn't think of it as snobbery.

Because America is not a democracy, it's not a place of opportunity, he knows, if you can't choose to be white.

We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we're abusing it.

You boys grew up in peacetime, financially secure, with a powerful family name behind you. And you still want me to make things easier for you. I'm just giving you a little enrichment. Like they do for zoo animals, to keep them from expiring from boredom.

Maybe your son didn't get that job because he's not good enough. Or he's lazy. Or the other guy was better than him, no matter what his skin color. I think the white people who have been here for two hundred years are the ones pulling down the country. They don't know how to work — they've had it too easy

Maybe that was why I wanted to slap so many of the zombies; they had no idea how freaking lucky they were. Lucky and ignorant, happy little rich kids who believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and thought that life was supposed to be fair.

all six of them a license." "That

Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.