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03d6d2b Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once asked a group of women at a university why they felt threatened by men. The women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were afraid women would laugh at them. men women humor privilege Molly Ivins
856bfe3 The better you look, the more you see. privilege Bret Easton Ellis
75fb65f "I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." liberals privilege race Martin Luther King Jr.
fcd7b6e I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species. privilege zombies John Green
f32d893 Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges. privilege James Baldwin
ec5a2b9 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. imagination privilege J.K. Rowling
5459a7f 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. injustice legal-system privilege law justice power Howard Zinn
92e1aa5 When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right. privilege Jodi Picoult
4a82cd7 "...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality. racism hypocricy george-zimmerman trayvon-martin black-and-white black-history privilege white-privilege race-relations willful-ignorance Tim Wise
63b0053 Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living at the expense of people all over the world who've got a lower standard of living? Most Americans would say yes. Now we ask the question, are you content to enjoy your political freedom at the expense of people who are less free? I think they would also say yes. politics privilege William S. Burroughs
d173805 Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived. gratitude privilege Alan Lightman
8ed717f Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals. privilege status-quo Martin Luther King Jr.
fa390b1 Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we'd be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We'd hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We'd hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families. angry-white-males angry-young-man media-bias media-distortion school-shooting school-shootings privilege class class-struggle white-privilege media guns Michael S. Kimmel
f5248d0 It means understanding that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can't liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality - the fact that along different axes, we're all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged. kyriarchy privilege Shiri Eisner
07416a7 Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money. money privilege John Fowles
5ea4be5 It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn't a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America. privilege Salman Rushdie
490d108 "Privilege" is something else. "Privilege" is a judgment. "Privilege" is an opinion. "Privilege" is an accusation." privilege opinion judgment Joan Didion
97a7a22 According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess's chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.) privilege silk story-telling luck Jeffrey Eugenides
700690f The premise is: everybody's like me and we all think alike. The corollary is: people who don't think like me don't matter. privilege Ursula K. Le Guin
cfe085e Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur. taken-for-granted privilege Ruth Rendell
c2625de It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own. reconstruction jim-crow privilege property race W.E.B. Du Bois
97aec45 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? injustice wealth philosophy privilege human-nature C.S. Harris
32816c7 "We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we'll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say, "This is my truth," and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn't privilege become beside the point?" privilege understanding-oneself-and-others Roxane Gay
c28593a Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess. western-civilization privilege Iain M. Banks
b8bfb04 The law is where you buy it and what you pay for it. wealth privilege law Raymond Chandler
0764033 he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. privilege Edith Wharton
741c186 Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point-by-point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you--anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. libertarians libertarianism privilege police Kim Stanley Robinson
c27ad05 Hinter dem westlichen Konzept einer Idealstadt verbirgt sich die Idee der Privilegierung. Moreau hatte ihm ohne Zweifel zugestimmt. reading privilege Alberto Manguel
5fdcc66 They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead. privilege Colum McCann
62f5092 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. responsibility structural-violence privilege David Graeber
e51b5bf All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say. white-people privilege class hypocrisy Alice Walker
37acd31 What is pain to a man? A privilege! pain privilege James Clavell
ed42e74 If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. privilege Roxane Gay
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