Privilege Quotes

“I do not believe guilt is inherited, but responsibility is, and there is nobody alive today whose existence has not been shaped by colonialist, racist forces. That is a legacy we all live with, and we should all deal with the consequences. If you have benefitted, then soaking yourself in remorse and guilt does not help anyone. What you can do, though, is ask constantly how you have felt those benefits. At whose expense were they gained?”
― Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums... and Why We Need to Talk About It

“This morning the sunrise splashed a brilliant red across a sleepy sky. And I wondered what right I had to such a breathtaking sight. As I pondered the thought, I realized that this was not some right that I possess. Rather, it was a gift that God bestowed.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Empathy is no substitute for experience itself. We don’t get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are or are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“In my next lifetime I wanted to come back as a guy. They seemed to always get the upper hand.”
― Victoria Laurie, Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye

“Those who say they will not vote or they prefer not to vote. It is either they are privilege or they are talking from the point of being privilege.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, and all professing to love liberty.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful.”
― Oksana Zabuzhko

“There is not a moment where a sunset is not happening. Yet, despite the fact that there is a sunset occurring at every moment of every day, no two are ever alike. And I marvel at the limitless genius of the God who handed me the privilege of living this day in a manner entirely unique to every yesterday and all tomorrows.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life. But don’t make it the last day that you actually think about that.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Very few have a place on olympus.”
― monaristw

“One of the biggest problems with so-called "cancel culture" is not the "cancelling" itself. Instead, it the crisis of imagination that exposes our collective inability to engage the complexities of social issues with nuance.

What generally happens is that when there is any significant call for accountability and justice, it is uncritically deemed "cancel culture", pointing to the few extremes as "proof". Without question, ruthless public shaming and ostracization is never ultimately beneficial to all involved. However, that fact is too often forced through a binary lens that fails to address the individual and systemic issues at play, posit restorative/transformative consequences, and require better, more informed accountability.

This is further complicated by the tendency of those with social privilege to lean into the rhetoric of "dialogue" and some variety of "bothsidesism" that fails to address underlying systemic imbalances of power and relative impact of social issues, all while policing tone and emotion as though anger and hurt are disqualifying.

If there is a tendency for some to lean too strongly into "cancelling"- a legitimate issue that we need to address- it is largely because it is an attempt at correcting the over-emphasis on biased, normative systems that benefit the privileged and perpetuate harm.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Privilege and prosperity come with responsiblity.”
― Carolyn Custis James, Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women

“And we say, ‘Down with the privileges of education, as well as those of birth!’ We are anarchists precisely because these privileges revolt us. They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure them in a society that began by proclaiming equality?”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“...[F]or centuries, there was peace,' I say.

'For the fey, there was peace,' he corrects. casting me an amused glance. Of course they found it peaceful. They were the ones in power. The held the reins. How could they not be at peace? The humans, however, were certainly never peaceful. They lived lives of fear and cowering.”
― Laura Sebastian, Half Sick of Shadows

“...[F]or centuries, there was peace,' I say.

'For the fey, there was peace,' he corrects. casting me an amused glance. 'Of course they found it peaceful. They were the ones in power. The held the reins. How could they not be at peace? The humans, however, were certainly never peaceful. They lived lives of fear and cowering.”
― Laura Sebastian, Half Sick of Shadows

“...[F]or centuries, there was peace," I say.

"For the fey, there was peace," he corrects. casting me an amused glance. "Of course they found it peaceful. They were the ones in power. They held the reins. How could they not be at peace? The humans, however, were certainly never peaceful. They lived lives of fear and cowering.”
― Laura Sebastian, Half Sick of Shadows

“The more powerful the group to which we belong, the less likely, generally, we are to question the system that legitimises and confers these privileges.”
― Anne Kearney, Counselling, Class and Politics: Undeclared Influences in Therapy

“I don’t know if today will be my last day. But I do know that it can be the first day that I begin to respect life enough to act as if it were my last.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Equality of condition and equality of opportunity must provide the foundation of an interdependent nation with building blocks found in dignity and respect given to every American, regardless of socioeconomic status.”
― Julie Banks Lewis, Critical Masses: Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Decides

“It strikes me that money can alleviate many of the miseries of common folk, but it opens up other avenues of suffering”
― Stacey Lee, The Downstairs Girl

“The people around you are the assignments that have been handed to you. Therefore, never forget the privilege of the assignment, and never shoot for anything less than an ‘A.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“This was the thing with boys like him. What he was feeling just then, that rage, wasn't the world falling in on him. It was an illusion shattering, the one that told him he deserved everything, and that it was owed to him simply because he existed.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Lore

“Not for the first time, I reflected that the normal, let alone the privileged, have a burden of guilt laid automatically on them from the cradle.”
― Mary Stewart

“Sebaik-baiknya privilege adalah dengan ilmu”
― Evan S. Parusa

“So many names and stories have been lost to time. Having a legacy is a privilege afforded only to a few. Often, it's about class. . . . sometimes it's just about when and were you were born.”
― Mallory O'Meara, Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol

“Privilege is saving confederacy statues because they're 'historic' but bulldozing through ancient sacred sites & artifacts for pipelines.

(8/18/2017 on Twitter)”
― Ruth Hopkins

“To Jim, all of life’s horrors belong to him, to grind up and burn for his profit and pleasure, whether he’s personally experienced said horrors or not. A straight, cis, able-bodied white man is the only person on this planet who can travel almost anywhere (and, as the famous Louis CK bit goes, to almost any time in history), unless they’re literally dropping into a war zone, and feel fairly comfortable and safe (and, often, in charge). To the rest of us, horrors aren’t a thought experiment to be mined—they’re horrors.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“It is terribly inhumane to block pathways out of poverty because you didn’t need those pathways.”
― Bernice A. King

“Because what is privilege if not an opportunity? Opportunity to make things better for everyone? Opportunity to see inequity and rectify it? Opportunity to take these immense and lucky gifts and make them count toward a better world for those who didn't win the arbitrary where-you-were-born lottery?”
― Brooke McAlary, Slow: Simple Living for a Frantic World

“Listening to lectures on the class struggle (after I discovered that such a struggle had been going on for ages), I found that I had a great deal in common with the everyday workers. In other years I had felt that as a newspaper artist I was a member of a profession which enjoyed important privileges and in which a man might possibly rise to fame and fortune. But I saw now that everyone who did productive work of any kind was at the mercy of those who employed him. They could make or break him whenever they so willed...I was living in a world morally and spiritually diseased, and I was learning some of the reasons why.”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times