Quotes About Privilege

In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.

Whether actors express "resentment" or "hostility" toward minorities is largely irrelevant for the maintenance of white privilege.

The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

Half the world is screaming for water and freedom when the other half is ordering cocktails and complaining about the service.

You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.

Any man can hold a girl's hand, but only the elite can hold her feet.

It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.

Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.

if the wealthiest fraction of a society feel that they can afford to insulate themselves from the common fate and buy their way out of the common institutions, that is also a form of social isolation.

Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.

Once in the glass, as dark as blood, the Bordeaux seems almost as though it is a living thing. Von Rumpel takes pleasure in knowing that he is the only person in the world who will have the privilege of tasting it before it is gone.

Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege.

For some years he had been awarded tribunicia sacrosanctitas, or the immunity from physical attack

When you are rich, people treat you with respect.

As for myself, I felt nothing but pity for Marc Bellamy. I'd been through the private-education system myself – another version of the full English – and knew only too well how the casual cruelty and the pack mentality that he had described could stay with you for the rest of your life.

and it wasn't even as if he did anything to deserve it. He just inherited it from his father and his father before him. This is 1955, for heaven's sake. Not the Middle Ages! Of course, it doesn't help having the bloody Tories still in power but you'd have thought we'd have moved away from the days when people were given wealth and power simply because of an accident of birth.

Ironic, isn't it! A group of socialists who had espoused the values of New Labour and who were loudly beating the drum for equality of opportunity and education were ready to pile onto a working-class kid who'd never had one-tenth of the privilege of their own son.

That's what's wrong with this country. You've got food banks in the north and down here in Hampstead there are people who don't think twice about spending a fortune on a fucking bottle of wine. It doesn't make sense.

People who are privileged can take more risks because of that safety shield that privilege provides.

I think that there's something in the American psyche, it's almost this kind of right or privilege, this sense of entitlement, to resolve our conflicts with violence. There's an arrogance to that concept if you think about it. To actually have to sit down and talk, to listen, to compromise, that's hard work.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

Doing stuff that I don't have to talk about because I'm not in a public company is fantastic.

It has been the greatest privilege of my adult and public life to have served, for 32 years, as the Member of Parliament for our local Highlands and Islands communities.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.