Quotes about privilege
page 6

“"Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Powers and Prospects, 1996, p.137
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Toni Morrison book Paradise

Paradise (1997)

Love, Life, God, Marriage

“Democracy entails a correlation between the public interest as expressed by a majority of the population and the governmental policies that affect them. The term encompasses various manifestations, including direct, participatory and representative democracy, but Governments must be responsive to people and not to special interests such as the military-industrial complex, financial bankers and transnational corporations. Democracy is inclusive and does not privilege an anthropological aristocracy.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
2013

People, Democracy

“And if a double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.
And if a ten ton truck kills the both of us, to die by your side,
the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

from the 1986 song "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"
From songs

Pleasure, Way

“Democracy is unstable as a political system as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society, and a manner of life which is in harmony with that type. To make it a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege which favour some groups and depress other, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into a servant of society, working within clearly defined limits and accountable for its actions to a public authority.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Equality (1931)

Life, Education, Democracy

“Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.”

Friedrich Engels book Principles of Communism

Principles of Communism (1847)

Country, Wealth

“People with advantages are loath 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 book The Power Elite

Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 14.

People, Imagination, Nature

“Someone has said that world history must from time to time be rewritten. When has there been an epoch that made this as necessary as does the present one? You provided a superb example of how it should be done. The hatred of the Romans for the victor, even when he was kindly, presumption upon outmoded privileges, the desire for a different state of affairs without having anything better in view, irrational hopes, haphazard undertakings, alliances with no prospect of benefit, and whatever else is the unhappy retinue of such times—you have described all that magnificently, proving to us that such things really happened in those days.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

As quoted by Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (1991) from a letter referring to Sartorius' historical study of the rule of the Ostragoths in Italy

World, Hope, History, Time

“Our opponents like to try and make you believe that Conservatism is a privilege of the few. But Conservatism conserves all that is great and best in our national heritage.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 1, p. 22

God, People, Stupidity, Feeling

“To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

Message to the National Security League in honor of Constitution Day, quoted in New York Times (17 September 1923) "Ceremonies Mark Constitution Day".
1920s

“Cooperation and mutuality produce goodwill and harmony, whereas competition for special privilege divides men into warring camps.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

Men, War

“This privileged position (lawyer) obliges you to remember that most of the population cannot afford your services or fees. As a consequence they are denied access to justice. It therefore behoves the legal profession to consider practical ways of alleviating this unacceptable state of affairs.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Speech to the Fiji Law Society, 2 July 2005.

Justice, Way

“The welfare of the weaker sections of our society has been entrusted to the nation’s collective care by the founding fathers of our polity. Their advancement must, therefore be regarded by the nation as its privilege.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, P.185

“It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Men, War, Forgetting

“It was fantastic to fight with Michael, a privilege for me. I said in 2005 that it was important to become Champion when Michael was still there, for the value and the recognition that people outside the sport would give to the championship. But people said we did not fight directly in 2005; this year, it was me versus Michael all year. The history books will say that the last two Championships he raced in were won by Alonso, and that makes me very proud. It was a pleasure to compete against him.”

Fernando Alonso (1981) Spanish racing driver

About racing against, and beating, Michael Schumacher http://www.planet-f1.com/News/Story_Page/0,15909,3210_3463_1771697,00.html (December 13, 2006)

People, Pleasure, Books, History

“Man's most sacred privilege is freedom of will, the ability to obey or disobey his Maker.”

Joseph H. Hertz (1872–1946) British rabbi

Genesis II, 17 (p. 8)
The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (one-volume edition, 1937, ISBN 0-900689-21-8

Freedom

“Prediction had become a privilege now lost to her. Never mind the outside world, she could not even guess her own actions, or the course of her thoughts.
Was this the true nature of emotion? she wondered. The great defier of logic, of control—the whims of being human. What lay ahead?”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 16 (p. 457)

World, Nature

“The better sort here pretend to the utmost compassion for animals of every kind. To hear them speak, a stranger would be apt to imagine they could hardly hurt the gnat that stung them: they seem so tender and so full of pity, that one would take them for the harmless friends of the whole creation; the protectors of the meanest insect or reptile that was privileged with existence. And yet, would you believe it? I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals toasted up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! they pity and they eat the objects of their compassion.”

Oliver Goldsmith book The Citizen of the World

The Citizen of the World (1760–1761), Letter XV https://books.google.it/books?id=cIELAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA44.

Men, Imagination, Time, Animals

“If I tend to reread the European past in my own Postmodern image, if I frequently write about Bach and Beethoven in the same ways in which I discuss the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and John Zorn, it is not to denigrate the canon but rather to show the power of music all throughout its history as a signifying practice. For this is how culture always works—always grounded in codes and social contracts, always open to fusions, extensions, transformations. To me, music never seems so trivial as in its 'purely musical' readings. If there was at one time a rationale for adopting such an intellectual position, that time has long since past. And if the belief in the nineteenth-century notion of aesthetic autonomy continues to be an issue when we study cultural history, it can no longer be privileged as somehow true.”

Susan McClary (1946) American musicologist

McClary, Susan (2000), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, p. 186–169. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520232089

Music, Way, History, Study

“The fall of the patriciate by no means divested the Roman commonwealth of its aristocratic character. We have already indicated that the plebeian party carried within it that character from the first as well as, and in some sense still more decidedly than, the patriciate; for, while in the old body of burgesses an absolute equality of rights prevailed, the new constitution set out from a distinction between the senatorial houses who were privileged in point of burgess rights and of burgess usufructs, and the mass of the other citizens. Immediately, therefore, on the abolition of the patriciate and the formal establishment of civic equality, a new aristocracy and a corresponding opposition were formed; and we have already shown how the former engrafted itself as it were on the fallen patriciate, and how, accordingly, the first movements of the new party of progress were mixed up with the last movements of the old opposition between the orders. The formation of these new parties began in the fifth century, but they assumed their definite shape only in the century which followed. The development of this internal change is, as it were, drowned amidst the noise of the great wars and victories, and not merely so, but the process of formation is in this case more withdrawn from view than any other in Roman history. Like a crust of ice gathering imperceptibly over the surface of a stream and imperceptibly confining it more and more, this new Roman aristocracy silently arose; and not less imperceptibly, like the current concealing itself beneath and slowly extending, there arose in opposition to it the new party of progress. It is very difficult to sum up in a general historical view the several, individually insignificant, traces of these two antagonistic movements, which do not for the present yield their historical product in any distinct actual catastrophe. But the freedom hitherto enjoyed in the commonwealth was undermined, and the foundation for future revolutions was laid, during this epoch; and the delineation of these as well as of the development of Rome in general would remain imperfect, if we should fail to give some idea of the strength of that encrusting ice, of the growth of the current beneath, and of the fearful moaning and cracking that foretold the mighty breaking up which was at hand. The Roman nobility attached itself, in form, to earlier institutions belonging to the times of the patriciate. Persons who once had filled the highest ordinary magistracies of the state not only, as a matter of course, practically enjoyed all along a higher honour, but also had at an early period certain honorary privileges associated with their position. The most ancient of these was doubtless the permission given to the descendants of such magistrates to place the wax images of these illustrious ancestors after their death in the family hall, along the wall where the pedigree was painted, and to have these images carried, on occasion of the death of members of the family, in the funeral procession.. the honouring of images was regarded in the Italo-Hellenic view as unrepublican, and on that account the Roman state-police did not at all tolerate the exhibition of effigies of the living, and strictly superintended that of effigies of the dead. With this privilege were associated various external insignia, reserved by law or custom for such magistrates and their descendants:--the golden finger-ring of the men, the silver-mounted trappings of the youths, the purple border on the toga and the golden amulet-case of the boys--trifling matters, but still important in a community where civic equality even in external appearance was so strictly adhered to, and where, even during the second Punic war, a burgess was arrested and kept for years in prison because he had appeared in public, in a manner not sanctioned by law, with a garland of roses upon his head.(6) These distinctions may perhaps have already existed partially in the time of the patrician government, and, so long as families of higher and humbler rank were distinguished within the patriciate, may have served as external insignia for the former; but they certainly only acquired political importance in consequence of the change of constitution in 387, by which the plebeian families that attained the consulate were placed on a footing of equal privilege with the patrician families, all of whom were now probably entitled to carry images of their ancestors. Moreover, it was now settled that the offices of state to which these hereditary privileges were attached should include neither the lower nor the extraordinary magistracies nor the tribunate of the plebs, but merely the consulship, the praetorship which stood on the same level with it,(7) and the curule aedileship, which bore a part in the administration of public justice and consequently in the exercise of the sovereign powers of the state.(8) Although this plebeian nobility, in the strict sense of the term, could only be formed after the curule offices were opened to plebeians, yet it exhibited in a short time, if not at the very first, a certain compactness of organization--doubtless because such a nobility had long been prefigured in the old senatorial plebeian families. The result of the Licinian laws in reality therefore amounted nearly to what we should now call the creation of a batch of peers. Now that the plebeian families ennobled by their curule ancestors were united into one body with the patrician families and acquired a distinctive position and distinguished power in the commonwealth, the Romans had again arrived at the point whence they had started; there was once more not merely a governing aristocracy and a hereditary nobility--both of which in fact had never disappeared--but there was a governing hereditary nobility, and the feud between the gentes in possession of the government and the commons rising in revolt against the gentes could not but begin afresh. And matters very soon reached that stage. The nobility was not content with its honorary privileges which were matters of comparative indifference, but strove after separate and sole political power, and sought to convert the most important institutions of the state--the senate and the equestrian order--from organs of the commonwealth into organs of the plebeio-patrician aristocracy.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The History of Rome - Volume 2

Death, Men, War, Youth

“In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted and coddled and given special consideration and special privilege. Of course that can't be done.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Gompers, Samuel. The Samuel Gompers Papers: The American Federation of Labor and the Great War, 1917-18. Stuart Bruce Kaufman, Peter J. Albert, and Grace Palladino, eds. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006, p. 348.

Color, Idea

“The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

Love, World, Light, Selfishness

“He is an extraordinary man with extraordinary career. It`s been a privilege to play with him. It was emotional for all of us but it`s a great time to celebrate the farewell of one of India`s greatest cricketers.”

Anil Kumble (1970) Former Indian cricketer

By Rahul Dravid.
Kumble Calls it a Day: Quotes... For and By Kumble...

Time

“In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from Wikipedia: The Great Masturbator
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Love, World, Feeling, Reality

“Such is the privilege of genius; it perceives, it seizes relations where vulgar eyes see only isolated facts.”

François Arago (1786–1853) French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and politician

Tel est le privilége du génie : il aperçoit, il saisit des rapports, là où des yeux vulgaires lie voient que des faits isolés.
Joseph Fourier, p. 412.
Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859)

“Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous, we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make.
I cannot emphasize it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community, because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on, will vanish.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Constituent Assembly (1947)

Happiness, People, Communication, Change

“Although Saussure recognized the necessity of putting the phonic substance between brackets ("What is essential in language, we shall see, is foreign to the phonic character of the linguistic sign" [p. 21]. "In its essence it [the linguistic signifier] is not at all phonic" [p. 164]), Saussure, for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, everything that links the sign to phone. He also speaks of the "natural link" between thought and voice, meaning and sound (p. 46). He even speaks of "thought-sound" (p. 156). I have attempted elsewhere to show what is traditional in such a gesture, and to what necessities it submits. In any event, it winds up contradicting the most interesting critical motive of the Course, making of linguistics the regulatory model, the "pattern" for a general semiology of which it was to be, by all rights and theoretically, only a part. The theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formalization) toward a hierarchizing teleology:… One finds exactly the same gesture and the same concepts in Hegel. The contradiction between these two moments of the Course is also marked by Saussure's recognizing elsewhere that "it is not spoken language that is natural to man, but the faculty of constituting a language, that is, a system of distinct signs …," that is, the possibility of the code and of articulation, independent of any substance, for example, phonic substance.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions, 1982, p. 21

Motivation, Nature, Parting

“Some time ago a most salutary sanction of our constitution was promulgated, which we now make doubly noteworthy by the repetition of our law. If any Jew has acquired a Christian slave or one belonging to some other religious community, and has not shrunk from circumcising him, let the circumcised person, according to this decree, attain his freedom and enjoy its privileges. It is not right that a Jew who has circumcised a slave of this kind should keep him in slavery.”

Constantine the Great (274–337) Roman emperor

9 March 336 according to page 38 of Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century https://books.google.ca/books?id=BXuxAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA38 by Gunter Steinberger in 1999

Law, Communication, Freedom, Time

“There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion. Take from religion its exclusive power and it will no longer exist.”

Bruno Bauer book The Jewish Question

As quoted in Karl Marx's "The Jewish Question" by ; as translated in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels : Collected Works (1975) edited by International Publishers

Religion

“You too, find release only in art, you are one of those privileged people who have that gift, and you will be free and at peace so long as you make use of it. Art gives us an inner superiority, for it has scope for every sensation of which human beings are capable, and first and foremost for love, which is the basis for knowledge. The artist loves without wanting to possess, and no one on earth can understand that except other artists, that is why other people think us mad.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Letter to Nele van de Velde ((daughter of Henry van de Velde), Frauenkirch, 29 November 1920; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1920's

Love, People, Peace, Art

“The only privilege a student had that was worth his claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Money, Education, Problem, Thinking

“Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

Freedom

“… you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who'd offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls.”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

'Tis (2000)

Money, World, School, Study

“I am supportive of people. I am supportive of the American Dream Trump is trying to destroy. I want them to understand. Regardless of your religion, you don’t get special privileges because you claim to believe something different from everybody else. You don’t get special privileges because you get to claim that you believe the same things as the majority.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

People, Religion, Dreams, Understanding

“When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Madame de Pompadour (1954).

People, Sadness, Lovers, Time

“A student directing Chatlotte Whitton to a parking place at Champlain High School called her Mrs. Whitton. Charoltte Whitton replied to the student, "Mrs. Whitton? My dear girl, no man has had that privilege."”

Charlotte Whitton (1896–1975) Canadian politician

School, Girl

“The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist." This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term "anti-Soviet" used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum, called "anti-globalization" in the propaganda system -- which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow, highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called "pro-globalization" by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Sniježana Matejčić, June 2005 http://www.galerija-rigo.hr/05/chomsky_en_2.htm. Quotes 2000s, 2005

Life, People, World, Education

“Fascism rewarded jackasses in uniform. Democracy gives privileges to those in sports' gear. In Italy, political regimes come to pass. Jackasses remain. Triumphant.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Controcorrente, 1974 – 1986.
1950s - 1990s

Democracy, Sport

“Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Hostility, Way, Motivation, Problem

“I followed [[w:Vivekananda|Swami Vivekananda’s teachings when I was young. He said, this life is short, its vanities are transient. He alone lives who lives for others. I think more than any other country, in our country, this is very important today. ‘Others’ also includes family members, because charity begins at home. But if you are an educated person, do something which can help improve the lives and livelihoods of your fellow people. And then towards the latter part of your life, you feel more satisfied that you have one something not only for yourself or for your family, but you have done something which has made a slight difference in the lives of the less privileged.”

M. S. Swaminathan (1925) Indian scientist

On his ideals in pdf, In Conversation: M. S. Swaminathan, 25 October 2011, Current Science http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/101/08/0996.pdf,

Life, People, Education, Family

“When negotiations are at an impasse, when States dig their heels in, it is time to ‘undig’ them in a spirit of compromise. We all need to unlearn the predator in us, unlearn discrimination, unlearn privilege.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Statement by Alfred de Zayas statement on International Day of Peace, 21 September 2012 - http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12557&LangID=E. 2012

Time

“It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. But the organ of suppression is now the majority of the population, and not the minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage-slavery. And since the majority of the of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" for suppression is no longer necessary. in this sense the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority.. the majority can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more the functions of state power devolve upon the people generally, the less need is there for the existence of this power.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

3.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

People, Communication, Sense

“The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the central government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government.”

George Wallace (1919–1998) 45th Governor of Alabama

Speech in the door of the University of Alabama auditorium
1960s

Universe

“Dialogue in Hell:
Fourth Dialogue
There are tremendous populations riveted to labor by poverty, as they were in other times by slavery. What difference, I ask you, do your fictions make to their happiness? Your great political movement has after all only ended in the triumph of a minority privileged by chance as the ancient nobility was by birth. What difference does it make to the proletariat bent over in its labor, weighted down by the heaviness of its destiny, that some orators have the right to speak, that some journalists have the right to write? You have created rights which will be purely academic for the mass of the people, since it cannot make use of them. These rights, of which the law permits him the ideal enjoyment and necessity refuses him the actual exercise, are the people only a bitter irony of defeat.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Happiness, People, Law, Exercises

“The relationship between governments and the press has always been recognized as a matter of large importance. Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Whereever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press. It has always been realized, sometimes instinctively, oftentimes expressly, that truth and freedom are inseparable. An absolutism could never rest upon anything save a perverted and distorted view of human relationships and upon false standards set up and maintained by force. It has always found it necessary to attempt to dominate the entire field of education and instruction. It has thrived on ignorance. While it has sought to train the minds of a few, it has been largely with the purpose of attempting to give them a superior facility for misleading the many. Men have been educated under absolutism, not that they might bear witness to the truth, but that they might be the more ingenious advocates and defenders of false standards and hollow pretenses. This has always been the method of privilege, the method of class and caste, the method of master and slave.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Men, Truth, Education, Way

“In the course of my twenty years career as an assailant of special privilege, I have attacked pretty nearly every important interest in America. The statements I have made, if false, would have been enough to deprive me of a thousand times all the property I ever owned, and to have sent me to prison for a thousand times a normal man's life. I have been called a liar on many occasions, needless to say; but never once in all these twenty years has one of my enemies ventured to bring me into a court of law, and to submit the issue between us to a jury of American citizens.”

Upton Sinclair book The Brass Check

The Brass Check (1919)

Life, Law, Time, Falseness

“I cannot believe that the gentry of England will be made mere drumheads to be sounded upon by a Prime Minister to give forth unmeaning and empty sounds, and to have no articulate voice of their own. No! You are the gentry of England who represent the counties. You are the aristocracy of England. Your fathers led our fathers: you may lead us if you will go the right way. But, although you have retained your influence with this country longer than any other aristocracy, it has not been by opposing popular opinion, or by setting yourselves against the spirit of the age. In other days, when the battle and the hunting-fields were the tests of manly vigour, why, your fathers were first and foremost there. The aristocracy of England were not like the noblesse of France, the mere minions of a court; nor were they like the hidalgoes of Madrid, who dwindled into pigmies. You have been Englishmen. You have not shown a want of courage and firmness when any call has been made upon you. This is a new era. It is the age of improvement, it is the age of social advancement, not the age for war or for feudal sports. You live in a mercantile age, when the whole wealth of the world is poured into your lap. You cannot have the advantages of commercial rents and feudal privileges; but you may be what you always have been, if you will identify yourselves with the spirit of the age. The English people look to the gentry and aristocracy of their country as their leaders. I, who am not one of you, have no hesitation in telling you, that there is a deep-rooted, an hereditary prejudice, if I may so call it, in your favour in this country. But you never got it, and you will not keep it, by obstructing the spirit of the age.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/mar/13/effects-of-corn-laws-on-agriculturists (13 March 1845). 1840s

War, People, Age, World

“Be sure that Christ is not behind you, but before, calling and drawing you on. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 89.

Beauty, Christ, Drawing

“The real story of how the west was won bears little resemblance to the storybook accounts handed down to generations of young Americans. Behind the facade of frontier heroism and cowboy bravado, of civilizing forces and homespun values, lies a quite different tale: a saga of ecocide and genocide, of forced enclosures of land and people, and the expropriation of an entire subcontinent for the exclusive benefit of a privileged few.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), p. 107

People

“Every institution goes through three stages — utility, privilege, and abuse.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

As quoted in Culture and Progress (1930) by Wilson Dallam Wallis.

“One ground for suspicion of apparently sincere moral convictions is their link with some special interest of those who hold them. The questions cui bono and cui malo are appropriate questions to raise when we are searching for possible contaminants of conscience. Entrenched privilege, and fear of losing it, distorts one's moral sense.”

Annette Baier (1929–2012) New Zealand philosopher

Source: Knowing Our Place in the Animal World, p. 63

Fear, Search, Question, Sense

“I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they're making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to — and removing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military's job is to do one thing, and that is to defend our country.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

People, Thinking, Country

“Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Life, People, Education, Nature

“We, the Great-Russian proletarians, who defend no privileges whatever, do not defend this privilege either. We are fighting on the ground of a definite state; we unite the workers of all nations living in this state; we cannot vouch for any particular path of national development, for we are marching to our class goal along all possible paths.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Right of Nations to Self-Determination", (1904), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

Fight

“Toronto Globe – he was a man who loved the people and fought for their rights against privilege and monopoly in every form. (Buckingham and Ross 1892, p. 661)”

Alexander Mackenzie (1822–1892) 2nd Prime Minister of Canada

His Character

Love, People

“I had not been left behind in the parish. I wasn't holding the hands of grieving widows. I wasn't struggling to educate my children. I was pontificating on the great issues of the day in the comfort of a privileged lifestyle.”

John Danforth (1936) American politician

Page 47
Faith and Politics (2006)

Children, Education

“The thing about happiness is that it doesnt help you to grow; only unhappiness does that. So I'm grateful that my bed of roses was made up equally of blossoms and thorns. I've had a privileged, creative, exciting life, and I think that the parts that were less joyous were preparing me, testing me, strengthening me.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On strength, p. 307.
Autobiography

Life, Happiness, Thinking, Help

“In fact, their contempt for the native converts was deeper than that for their Hindu subjects. They had all along looked down upon the native converts as Ajlãf (low-born) and Arzãl (base-born) as compared to the Ashrãf (exalted) which distinctive designation they had reserved for themselves….. It was at this critical juncture that the frustrated fraternity of foreign Muslims took a very strategic step. They started swearing by a solidarity with the native Muslims whom they had despised so far. They let loose on the native Muslims an army of mercenary Mullahs recruited, mostly from their own ranks. These Mullahs went about broadcasting the message that ‘Islam was in danger’, and that ‘Hindus were out to enslave and exploit the Muslim minority’. It was in this manner that the residues of Islamic imperialism managed to ‘merge’ themselves with the native converts, and to present themselves at the head of a strong phalanx pitted against whatever historical forces threatened their unjust privileges. Hitherto, the haughty Ashrãf had stood strictly aloof from the abject Ajlãf and the despised Arzãl. Now all of a sudden the latter became the former’s ‘brothers in faith’. This was a tremendous transformation of the political scene in the second decade of the 20th century. … The British never attached more than a nuisance value to this noisy fraternity which had to be befriended or ignored according to the needs of British policy at any time. It was the national leadership which was impressed by this mobilisation of the ‘Muslim masses’ and the pathos of ‘Muslim plight’. They accepted not only separate electorates but also weightages for the ‘Muslim minority’ in many provinces.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Faith, Strong, Time

“I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you everything you wish to know about my views or actions if your committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the fifth amendment at the hearing.”

Lillian Hellman (1905–1984) American dramatist and screenwriter

Letter to HUAC (19 May 1952)

People

“The cross is not only imposed upon the saints as their burden, but bequeathed unto them as their legacy. It is given unto them as an honor and privilege.”

Richard Alleine (1611–1681) English clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 171.

“The case had caused considerable excitement among the “believers” (Mu'mins) and interest among the “infidels” (KAfirs) in April-May, 1985. The press in India and abroad gave many headlines to what was rightly regarded as an unprecedented event in the history of religion. It was the first time that a Pagan had questioned the character of a document hailed as the very Word of God by a People of the Book. The roles now stood reversed. So far it had been the privilege of the Peoples of the Book to ban and burn the sacred literature of the Pagans.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

God, People, Books, Religion

“But the tyranny of custom, like all other tyrannies, when grown quite unbearable—for it is wonderful what people will endure-; had already sown the seeds of its own dissolution. Out of the hardship had grown the repining, and to repine at the exercise of an alleged right is soon to question its authority, and the first question asked shakes the whole ancient and time-honoured fabric of privilege.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Other Gift Books

People, Exercises, Question, Time

“Jerry was willowy and worried. He had one good trick. Now and then, someone with a lot of privileges was allowed to leave the hospital in a taxi. That person would say, “Jerry, call me a cab.” Jerry would say, “You’re a cab.””

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

We loved this.
Girl, Interrupted (1994)

Love, Personality

“There is but one solution of the problem, and it is to obliterate absolutely all color line. Open up to the Negro as to the white man, the political offices of the country, making but one test, that of mental and moral fitness. Throw down at once the barriers which close out the Negro merely on account of his color from hotel, theater, and railway carriage. Meet your Negro brother as your equal at banquets and in social gatherings. Give him, in one word, and in full meaning of the terms, equal rights and equal privileges, political, civil, and social. I know no color line, I will acknowledge none. The time is not distant when Americans and Christians will wonder that there ever was a race prejudice.”

John Ireland (bishop) (1838–1918) Catholic bishop

[McClarey, Donald R, Father John Ireland and the Fifth Minnesota, The American Catholic, 2012-08-23, https://the-american-catholic.com/2012/08/23/father-john-ireland-and-the-fifth-minnesota/, 2018-02-04] [Source for quote doesn't list primary source., February 2018]

Color, Problem, Distant, Time

“The bourgeois never included the ownership of capital as one of the social restraints that should be abolished, for the simple reason that it was not to him a restraint at all. It never therefore entered his head to regard it as such, and he saw nothing inconsistent in calling for the abolition of privilege, monopoly, and so forth, while hanging on to his capital.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), Pacifism and Violence: A Study in Bourgeois Ethics

“As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve: a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders; b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs; c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Theory of Communicative Action

Source: The Theory of Communicative Action, 1987, p. 308

World, Understanding

“There's no question that we need tougher drunk-driving laws for repeat offenders. We need to take a lesson from European countries where driving isn't a right but a privilege. There isn't a person on this planet by this time who doesn't know that when you consume alcohol you shouldn't get behind the wheel of a car. The people who do it anyway should have their privilege to drive taken away.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

People, Alcohol, Law, Cars

“[The Nazis] handed out billions in price subsidies to farmers…. As early as December 1939, a high-ranking financial administrator complained that the privileging of farmers ‘is in many case so grotesque that it can scarcely be kept secret from the rest of the populace, segments of which are being called on to make real sacrifices.”

Götz Aly (1947) German journalist, historian and social scientist

Source: Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2007), p. 55

Secret

“It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.”

Alex Carey (1922–1988) Australian psychologist

Source: Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (1995), p. 21

Wisdom, Exercises, Business, Sense

“I am honored and humbled to be nominated by the President to lead the FBI, the premier law enforcement organization in the world. From my earliest days working with agents as a line prosecutor to my time working with them at the Department of Justice in the aftermath of 9/11, I have been inspired by the men and women of the FBI – inspired by their professionalism, integrity, courage, and sacrifice for the public. If confirmed, it will be a privilege and honor to once again work with them. America faces grave threats both here and abroad, and the FBI, in concert with its federal, state, and local partners continues to work steadfastly to prevent and hold accountable those responsible for these threats. I look forward to the confirmation process, and pledge my complete commitment to fairly and honorably protecting our country and upholding our Constitution and laws.”

Christopher A. Wray (1966) American lawyer, and current director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation

Statement of Christopher A. Wray https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-christopher-wray (June 26, 2017)

Women, Men, World, Justice

“For more than four years it has been my honor and my privilege to serve as the leader of the greatest police department in the world. This organization is made up of police officers, detectives and leaders who every day and every night go out and earn the title New York's Finest, and to have the opportunity to lead them and serve the people of New York City is something I have cherished and will always look back on with pride.”

Howard Safir (1941)

A statement by Safir in a press release announcing his resignation as New York City Police Commissioner.
[Archives of the Mayor's Press Office, http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2000b/pr307-00.html, Release #307-00 - MAYOR GIULIANI AND POLICE COMMISSIONER SAFIR ANNOUNCE THAT SAFIR IS LEAVING THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT, The City of New York, 2000-08-09, 2007-12-20]

People, World, Night

“If we compare the third-person attitude of someone who simply says how things stand (this is the attitude of the scientist, for example) with the performative attitude of someone who tries to understand what is said to him (this is the attitude of the interpreter, for example), the implications … become clear. … First, interpreters relinquish superiority that observers have by virtue of their privileged position, in that they themselves are drawn, at least potentially, into negotiations about the meaning and validity of utterances. By taking part in communicative action, they accept in principle the same status as those whose utterances they are trying to understand. … It is impossible to decide a priori who is to learn from whom.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Source: Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), p. 26

Communication, Understanding, Learning, Parting

“The people we see protesting in Madison are the equivalent of Hosni Mubarak apparatchiks who are trying to hold onto their privileges despite the will of the people who are being exploited to pay for them.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

Democrats Walk Off Job in Loyalty to Their Paymasters Over Voters
The Rush Limbaugh Show
2011-02-22
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_022211/content/01125108.guest.html
Regarding comparisons made between the 2011 Wisconsin protests and the 2011 Egyptian revolution

People

“Humanity … is never stationary. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.”

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) French socialist and political activist

in "August Blanqui, Heretical Communist," Radical Philosophy 185 (2014)

“Purely mathematical symbols have no meaning by themselves; it is the privilege of pure mathematicians, to quote Bertrand Russell, not to know what they are talking about. …It is the physicist, and not the mathematician, who must know what he is talking about.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Quotes, Mathematics

“The best part is that I'm able to come in, and whenever I want, choose an intern… oh, wait — Is this being recorded? No, the coolest part is the ability to have a silly thought about whatever is going on in your world at 10 o'clock in the morning, and be able to see it go out on the airwaves at 11 o'clock that night. That's an amazing privilege.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Philadelphia Inquirer interview, April 22, 2007

World, Waiting, Parting, Night

“If a Jew has bought and circumcised a Christian slave or one belonging to any other religious community, he may under no circumstances keep the circumcised person in slavery; rather, whoever suffers such a thing shall obtain the privilege of freedom.”

Constantine the Great (274–337) Roman emperor

21 October 335 according to page 37 of Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century https://books.google.ca/books?id=BXuxAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA37 by Gunter Steinberger in 1999 (see also translation above)

Communication, Freedom, Suffering, Personality

“Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its products among others for private benefit. The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 11

Men, Family, Communication, Drink

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women, Men, People, World

“We prove worthy of the privileges that we have not by paying anything back, but by paying it forward.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Kopan, Tal, Black senators eye future generation, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/black-senators-meeting-tim-scott-103928, 21 August 2018, Politico, February 26, 2014]
2014

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It has been thoughtfully observed that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of this knowledge. I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other or more ancient nationalities. Our seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here from all quarters of the globe, by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine right govern and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves, it would be unadvised to attempt to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or prescribe any on account of race, color or creed.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, World, Family, Faith

“Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as if they were privileges?”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Hope, Courage

“The House of Commons has lifted our affairs above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere. It thrives on criticism, it is perfectly impervious to newspaper abuse or taunts from any quarter, and it is capable of digesting almost anything or almost any body of gentlemen, whatever be the views with which they arrive. There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws; its traditions and its privileges are as lively today as when it broke the arbitrary power of the Crown and substituted that Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_405. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Law, Housing

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

68
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Hope, Idea, Failure

“Let me make it clear: this grammar school boy will take no lessons from that public school boy on the importance of children from less privileged backgrounds gaining access to university.”

Michael Howard (1941) British politician

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo031203/debtext/31203-03.htm#31203-03_wqn4, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 415 col. 498 At Prime Minister's Question Time in the House of Commons, December 3, 2003

Children, School, Boy, Universe

“It was abundantly clear from his letters that, virtually to the end, he remained deeply interested in national and world events. Yet he never ceased to engage in self-deprecating humor. I have a file containing a decade of correspondence with my dear friend. It is a file that I will keep. Max's death on April 19 was not unexpected and I am sure he would have viewed it as merciful. At the moving funeral service at Fort Meyer, Ambassador Philip Bonsal, a respected diplomat and longtime friend of the Taylors', spoke eloquently of General Taylor's "example", and correctly said that his friendship would remain a constant treasure in the lives of all of us who knew him. His younger son Tom's superb tribute brought tears to the eyes of most of us. He emphasized the closeness of the Taylor family- a closeness not often found in the lives of the world's great leaders. It typifies the mind and spirit that I was privileged to know. Maxwell Taylor's place in history will be a large one.”

Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1907–1998) American judge

As quoted in General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen (1989) by John Martin Taylor, p. xiv.
1980s

Death, Friendship, World, Family

“I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

China Mieville: "My job is not to try to give readers what they want..." http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2012/sep/20/china-mieville-interview, theguardian.com, Thursday 20 September, 2012.

Books, Thinking

“I would like to see from women in this industry what I have had the privilege of witnessing for a decade now. Strength, conviction, and unapologetic sensitivity for the healing of souls.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On women in the entertainment industry http://reelladies.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/reel-lady-masiela-lusha/

Women, Soul

“There was an old, crazy dude who used to live a long time ago. His name was Lord Buckley. And he said, a long time ago, he said, "People: They're kinda like flowers and it's been a privilege walking in your garden."”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

My love goes with you.
Reality...What a Concept (1979)

Love, People, Flowers, Time

“The experience of space is not a privilege of the gifted few, but a biological function.”

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) Hungarian artist

Moholy-Nagy by László Moholy-Nagy (1970) p. 238.

“We will not deny to any of those who fought against us any privileges under the government which we claim for ourselves; on the contrary, we honor all such who come forward in good faith to help build up the waste places, and to perpetuate our institutions against all enemies, as brothers in full interest with us in a common heritage; but we are not prepared to apologize for the part we took in the war. It is to be hoped that like trials will never again befall our country. In this sentiment no class of people can more heartily join than the soldier, who submitted to the dangers, trials, and hardships of the camp and the battlefield. On whichever side they may have fought, no class of people are more interested in guarding against a recurrence of those days.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Speech to the Society of the Army of Tennessee (1875)

War, People, Faith, Hope

“They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, of any kind of nature — and it won't hurt your feelings — like it's happening to your clothes not you.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Comment on fame, quoted in Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (1993) by Carl E. Rollyson, and in Symbolic Leaders: Public Dramas and Public Men (2006) by Orrin Edgar Klapp
Variant: People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, of any kind of nature — and it won't hurt your feelings — like it's happening to your clothing.
As quoted in Ms. magazine (August 1972) p. 40
Context: When you're famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, of any kind of nature — and it won't hurt your feelings — like it's happening to your clothes not you.

Feeling, Nature, Hurt, Clothes