Privilege Quotes

What is pain to a man? A privilege!

~ James Clavell

To me bathtubs are the epitome of luxury. Either you have no money to own one or you have no time to use one.

~ Akilnathan Logeswaran

If my heart is set on pursuing real treasures, my mind must be fixed solely on the privilege of enjoying them and freed of the obsession of owning them.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

When you see your feet with no footwear, also see those with no feet.

~ Amit Kalantri

We have been blessed with the privilege to live life. May we live to the fullness.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

~ Tim Wise

We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk with a harsh, urbanized accent and you use too many profanities, that will often get you barred from many arenas, no matter what you’re trying to say. On the other hand, polite, formal language is allowed almost anywhere even when all it is communicating is hatred and violence. Power always privileges its own discourse while marginalizing those who would challenge it or that are the victims of its power.

~ Junot Díaz

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

~ Howard Zinn

Those with unearned privileges often spin things as 'political correctness' to further silence those they wish to oppress.

~ Dashanne Stokes

From those to whom privilege and opportunity are given, we have the right to expect much.

~ John Vasconcellos

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.

~ David Graeber

The act of claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most importantly, it can diminish power from an oppressor, a dominant group.

~ Simon Tam

Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denying that.’ Captain Chillingworth’s words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a deep well of bitterness. ‘I am sure it will do a great deal of good for some of us. But I doubt I’ll be of that number, or that many Chinamen will. The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.

~ Amitav Ghosh

We live with this tortured feeling that we must create that which in reality we have the privilege of finding.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The gift of life is the only privilege you desperately need to turn your goals and dreams into realities.

~ Hafiz

Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

You don't necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don't have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about. They might endure situations you can never know anything about.

~ Roxane Gay

There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

~ Joanna Russ

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.

~ Agnostic Zetetic

But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.

~ Colleen Mccullough

Those who are most sensitive about politically incorrect terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any oppressed group but come from privileged strata of society.

~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

The American flag doesn't give her glory on a peaceful, calm day. It's when the winds pick up and become boisterous, do we see her strength. When she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed fingers, where we see the stretch of red-blood lines of man that fought for this land. The purity of white stripes that strips our sins, and the stars of Abraham's covenant, broad in a midnight blue sky. The rights our forefathers established. As it waves high in the currents of freedom, where the Torch of Liberty shines over the sea, does she give meaning to unity. When we strive as one nation, or when it drops half-mast, to a fallen soldier.

~ Anthony Liccione

We can breathe in the sweet scent of a tepid summer’s meadow after the kiss of a warm rain, and in the very same moment we can stand utterly breathless underneath the expanse of untold galaxies that breech the very edges of the universe itself. Such are the privileges we enjoy because of God’s unimaginable imagination.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.

~ Evelyn Dunbar

Inviting someone to work for pay is a sacred privilege and a trust. It must be regarded a high honor to be able to give another person work, and neither employer nor employee should abuse this relationship

~ Judy Frankel

If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

~ Jodi Picoult

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

~ J.k. Rowling

Our imagination is God’s ingenious gift that hands us the privilege of romping and playing in realities that we can’t see only because we’ve yet to create them.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Never having experienced inequality, therefore, the majority of straight white men will be absolutely oblivious to their own advantages – not because they must necessarily be insensitive, sexist, racist, homophobic or unaware of the principles of equality; but because they have been told, over and over again, that there is no inequality left for them – or anyone else – to experience – and everything they have experienced up to that point will only have proved them right.Let the impact of that sink in for a moment.By teaching children and teenagers that equality already exists, we are actively blinding the group that most benefits from inequality – straight white men – to the prospect that it doesn’t. Privilege to them feels indistinguishable from equality, because they’ve been raised to believe that this is how the world behaves for everyone. And because the majority of our popular culture is straight-white-male-dominated, stories that should be windows into empathy for other, less privileged experiences have instead become mirrors, reflecting back at them the one thing they already know: that their lives both are important and free from discrimination.And this hurts men. It hurts them by making them unconsciously perpetrate biases they’ve been actively taught to despise. It hurts them by making them complicit in the distress of others. It hurts them by shoehorning them into a restrictive definition masculinity from which any and all deviation is harshly punished. It hurts them by saying they will always be inferior parents and caregivers, that they must always be active and aggressive even when they long for passivity and quietude, that they must enjoy certain things like sports and beer and cars or else be deemed morally suspect. It hurts them through a process of indoctrination so subtle and pervasive that they never even knew it was happening , and when you’ve been raised to hate inequality, discovering that you’ve actually been its primary beneficiary is horrifying – like learning that the family fortune comes from blood money.Blog post 4/12/2012: Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men

~ Foz Meadows

Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?

~ Margaret Atwood

Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

We were made to get along, to be together, andit’s a truth that’s medically attested... Love and dance and connection strengthen every bodily system, while isolation, rage and sadness poison them with cortisol.

~ Steven Heighton

The rich never have a chance of being neighborly to their equals. The best they can do is feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind.

~ Aldous Huxley

How do you explain a world that gifts evil men with privilege and wealth and looks the other way while they torment and abuse the weakest members of society?

~ C.s. Harris

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure

~ Michel Foucault

Anytime the rich and poor combine, we should listen to whoever has the least power. Rich people are conditioned to assess the world through our privileges. The powerful tend to discredit or ignore the marginalized perspective because we can. We are shielded from the effects of a lopsided equation; we reap the benefits, not the losses. We don't mean to do this (or even know we do), but we evaluate other communities through the lens of advantage assuming we know best, have the most to offer. In doing so we unintentionally elevate our perception.

~ Jen Hatmaker

It contained a sad, but too common story of the hard-heartedness of the wealthy, and the misery endured by the children of the highborn. Blood is not water, it is said, but gold with them is dearer far than the ties of nature; to keep and augment their possessions being the aim and end of their lives, the existence, and, more especially, the happiness of their children, appears to them a consideration at once trivial and impertinent, when it would compete with family views and family greatness. To this common and and iniquitous feeling these luckless beings were sacrificed; they had endured the worst, and could be injured no more; but their orphan child was a living victim, less thought of than the progeny of the meanest animal which might serve to augment their possessions.Mrs. Baker felt some complacency on reading this letter; with the common English respect for wealth and rank, she was glad to find that her humble roof had sheltered a man who was the son — she did not exactly know of whom, but of somebody, who had younger sons and elder sons, and possessed, through wealth, the power of behaving frightfully ill to a vast number of persons.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

~ Robert B. Reich