Privilege Quotes

To know God`s laws and abide by them is a privilege.

We should be able to say, "This is my truth," and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot co-exist. Because at some point, doesn't privilege become beside the point?

How is it that we can punish women who are paid by politicians yet allow freedom and forgiveness to the politicians who pay them? The irony of the situation is that if we allow Sptizer’s deep pockets to buy his way back into our homes and hearts, then it’s not young women he hired who are whores, it’s the people of New York.

Privilege" is something else."Privilege" is a judgment."Privilege" is an opinion."Privilege" is an accusation.

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

C. Wright Mills

I'm starting to realize that being born into this social world is a little like being born into clean air. You take it in as soon as you breathe, and pretty soon you don't even realize that while you can walk around with clear lungs, other people are wearing oxygen masks just to survive.

Randa Abdel-Fattah

I wonder why it is that the countries with the most nobles also have the most misery?

You’re white. You’re straight. You’re well educated, healthy and beautiful. Every time is for people like you.

I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species.

Check your privilege, Hitler! I'm a nut job, not an asshole.

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others.

Ronald Rolheiser

As difficult an environment as the DA's Office could be, I saw no overarching conspiracy against women. The unequal treatment was usually more a matter of old habits dying hard.

Sonia Sotomayor

Preacher pulled her gun to her lap, the trigger aimed toward the stranger. . . . He stared at her like he was ready to dial 911, until he saw she was of European heritage, saw her clerical collar, saw the Bible on the dashboard. White, blond, and Christian. Trifecta. The man's shoulders relaxed and he smiled, waved, and kept going.

Eric Jerome Dickey

So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets...

All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.

One of the privileges of being an athlete is that on days when I have practice and games, I’m present whether I’m present or not. It’s not fair, but that’s the system. What can I do about it?

Privilege is presuming to speak for others you know nothing about.

DaShanne Stokes

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess's chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)

Jeffrey Eugenides

SOME PEOPLE ARE BORN LUCKY...OTHERS ARE LUCKY TO BE BORN...I SAY THE WORLD WAS LUCKY I WAS BORN

We who were born into privilege and opportunity were given these gifts with an expectation: to give them away.

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

John Kenneth Galbraith

It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.

Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with privilege and position.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.

Tim Wise

Duty and honor are oft enough realm only for those with security to afford them.

The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

In later years, I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

Booker T. Washington

To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”This invisibility is political.

Michael S. Kimmel

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

Maybe that was the trouble. She got the first and biggest share of everything – first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.

Carson McCullers

The message is clear: a good mother breast feeds. Significantly, this good mother shares a sociocultural profile with women in other developed countries: she is over thirty, is a high earning professional, does not smoke, takes prenatal classes, and benefits from a long maternity leave.

Élisabeth Badinter

Ignore the voice that scorns and ridicules to ensure it does not mold you. Stifling subtleties like these, if unchecked, are oppressive. Freedom is a love supreme birthright, not a privilege to be governed by any other.

The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality--whatever the current version of that concept happens to be--is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured. That is heterosexual privilege.

The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike.The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter.

Ursula K Le Guin

When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression

Unknown

All men were born in the same way: no privilege existed that was not of man's own contriving.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

It is a great privilege to travel alone on the right path knowing at heart that one day millions too will travel on that same road!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.

O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde?

Andrei Platonov

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.

With privilege comes responsibility, you must understand that. People expect us to lead by example and we shall not disappoint them.

Ben Elton

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive

Martin Luther King Jr.

...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

DaShanne Stokes

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.

DaShanne Stokes

You're not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you've always had.

DaShanne Stokes

Privilege is not knowing that you're hurting others and not listening when they tell you.

DaShanne Stokes

Political correctness' as 'over-sensitivity' is code for saying the privileged shouldn't have their unearned privileges questioned.

DaShanne Stokes

When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are. What happens during annexation—it’s a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.

DaShanne Stokes

White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.

Reni Eddo-Lodge

The best thing that ever happened to you might be your new job, spouse, awards, etc, but I tell you that being granted to live in order to enjoy these things are wonderful privileges most people can't get.

Michael Bassey Johnson

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Service to others in their time of need is a privilege and an honor.

Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.

...I have a theory about why and how all this has happened to you.Instead of having to earn it, you have been handed the presidency, the same way you've come by everything else in your life. Money and name alone have opened every door for you. Without effort or hard work or intelligence, or ingenuity, you have been bequeathed a life of privilege...So it's no wonder you think you deserved to be named President. You didn't earn it or win it- therefore it must be yours!

If love is the greatest gift of all-and I believe it is- then the greatest privilege of all is to be able to love someone.

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