“The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position.”
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege.... Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes... some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these heirarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position.
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Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996Related quotes
Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 496
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation
Source: My Life and Work (1922), p. 10
“He didn’t regret growing older, it was a privilege denied to many.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Stars (2013), p. 342
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4798183-110878,00.html The Guardian, 2003-11-15
“The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed.”
Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 10, p. 293
“Privilege is here, and with privilege goes responsibility.”
1963, Speech at Amherst College
“Every institution goes through three stages — utility, privilege, and abuse.”
As quoted in Culture and Progress (1930) by Wilson Dallam Wallis.
“Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people.”
The Stranger (1942)
Context: I don't know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy.
He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. <!-- translated by Matthew Ward
