Privilege And Entitlement Quotes

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What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.
Brené Brown
Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
Taking things for granted is a terrible disease. We should all be checking ourselves regularly for signs of it.
Kae Tempest (Hold Your Own)
If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
His worst fault is he thinks his brains entitle him to certain privileges.
Bernard Malamud (The Assistant)
Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people have had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren’t looking. Keep a close watch.
Margo Jefferson (Negroland: A Memoir)
If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenges to this entitlement.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
How much self-awareness does a life of privilege and entitlement afford the entitled? If you are birthed into a particular paradigm that serves you, what would compel you to look outside?
V (formerly Eve Ensler) (The Apology)
Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel.
Emma Cline (The Girls)
When you're a trans woman, you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody, but if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you're accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideals of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement.
Julia Serano (Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive)
Everyone's entitled to stupidity, but they really abuse the privilege, don't they?
Alexandra Bracken (The Darkest Legacy (The Darkest Minds, #4))
Rights’ are ‘privileges,’ and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The eye of true equality often seems to have some degree of disrespect for the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty to the supposedly accomplished, privileged high and lofty, although in reality, it's simply irrespectiveness.
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.
Andrew Jackson
There was no way I would pair up with this guy—the epitome of a privileged and entitled beefcake. He was everything I loathed rolled up into a tight, luscious, muscular, heady, and quixotically alluring package. My social phobias aside, I needed alone time with Ronan like a car needed a swim in the ocean.
L.H. Cosway (The Hooker and the Hermit (Rugby, #1))
When I say he’s not rude, what I really mean is he’s male and moneyed and got to that age where we allow him his chosen degree of rude as some sort of social entitlement, along with his bus pass.
Mhairi McFarlane (Don't You Forget About Me)
Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.
Louise Penny (A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #4))
Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?
Margaret Atwood
White males can't win these days - if they have something, they're "privileged" and if they want something, they're displaying "entitlement.
Stewart Stafford
If white American entitlement meant anything, it meant that no matter how patronizing, unashamed, deliberate, unintentional, poor, rich, rural, urban, ignorant, and destructive white Americans could be, black Americans were still encouraged to work for them, write to them, listen to them, talk with them, run from them, emulate them, teach them, dodge them, and ultimately thank them for not being as fucked up as they could be.
Kiese Laymon (How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America)
The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement “the arrogance of belonging,” and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
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.
Salman Rushdie (The Golden House)
I think it evidently appears, that there is no science, office, or dignity, which Women have not an equal right to share in with the Men: Since there can be no superiority, but that of brutal strength, shewn in the latter, to entitle them to engross all power and prerogative to themselves: nor any incapacity proved in the former, to disqualify them of their right, but what is owing to the unjust oppression of the Men, and might be easily removed.
Sophia Fermor (Woman Not Inferior to Man)
Independence that has declared its ‘independence’ from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.
Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
having privilege, or being privileged, is not the problem. Entitlement is the problem. I think of it this way: privilege is a hand-me-down heirloom, rooted in the circumstances you’re born into; entitlement is something you procure and choose to wear.
Arlan Hamilton (It's About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage)
A man can have anything, if he is willing to sacrifice. With your birth comes a solemn vow: You will have nothing. Your privilege is the dirt. In the darkness, only ambition will guide you. The oath you swear, the promises you make, they are yours alone. Your freedom will be the wars you wage. Your birthright the losses you suffer. Your entitlement the pain you endure. And when darkness finds you, you will face it alone.
Eternal Emperor Valkorion
Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.
Theodore Roosevelt
Life doesn’t owe me. However, it liberally gifts me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Very few things in our privileged life are entitled to the distinction, or the stranglehold fear can have on us.
debbie lynn - 360 degrees full circle
The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Freedom is viewed as a ‘right’ to those who don’t yet understand that everything is a ‘privilege.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It's the expectations that many white men have that they shouldn't have to climb, shouldn't have to struggle, as others do. It's the idea not only that they think they have less than others, but that they were supposed to have so much more. When you are denied the power, the success, or even the relationships that you think are your right, you either believe that you are broken or you believe that you have been stolen from.
Ijeoma Oluo (Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America)
Fulfillment is a right and not a privilege. Every single one of us is entitled to feel fulfilled by the work we do, to wake up feeling inspired to go to work, to feel safe when we’re there and to return home with a sense that we contributed to something larger than ourselves. Fulfillment is not a lottery. It is not a feeling reserved for a lucky few who get to say, “I love what I do.” For those who hold a leadership position, creating an environment in which the people in your charge feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves is your responsibility as a leader.
Simon Sinek (Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team)
function. In my previous book, Down Girl, I argued that misogyny should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
To decide that a man must be definitively punished is to deny him any further opportunity whatsoever to make reparation for his acts... This right to live that coincides with the opportunity for reparation is the natural right of every man, even the worst. The most wretched criminal and the worthiest judge here find themselves side by side, equally miserable and jointly responsible. Without this right, the moral life is strictly impossible. None among us is entitled to despair of a single man, unless it be after his death, which transforms his life into destiny and admits of a final judgment. But to pronounce this final judgment before death, to decree the closing of accounts when the creditor is still alive, is the privilege of no man. On these grounds, at least, he who judges absolutely condemns himself absolutely. ...It is because man is not fundamentally good that no one among us can set himself up as an absolute judge, for no one among us can pretend to absolute innocence. The verdict of capital punishment destroys the only indisputable human community there is, the community in the face of death, and such a judgment can only be legitimated by a truth or a principle that takes its place above all men, beyond the human condition.
Albert Camus (Reflections on the Guillotine)
I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence--the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he's never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger's dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted. They are arrogant, that's what I realize--maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can't touch them--just like I used to do. Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won't let go.
Ruth Ware (One by One)
To lead is a privilege, not an entitlement. It doesn't make you better than anyone; it helps you bring out the best in everyone. Accolades don't inspire a leader's vision; they've set their sights on the success of others. Leaders bypass shortsightedness and focus on the big picture. Leaders who always stand righteously never stand alone.
Carlos Wallace (Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings)
I wrote to expose the brutality of entitlement, gender violence, and class privilege in our society. But I would be failing you if you walked away from this book untouched by humanity, without seeing what I saw: those thousands of handwritten letters, the green-lipped fished at the bottom of the ocean, the winking court reporter. All the small miracles that sustained me. We may spend half our time wandering around, wondering what we're even doing here, why it's worth the effort. But living is an incredible thing, just to have been here, to have felt, if only briefly, the volume and depth of others' empathy. I wrote, most of all, to tell you I have seen how good the world could be.
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an “absence of knowledge” but “an active state of repelling knowledge,” embroiled in the statement, “Well, *I* don’t see race” where *I* eclipses the *seeing*. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
Everyone is entitled to be foolish sometimes, but many people abuse the privilege.
Jim Kraus (The Laugh-a-Day Book of Bloopers, Quotes & Good Clean Jokes)
Death reminds us that life is a temporary privilege, not an endless right.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I want to learn. I deserve to read and write. Thoughts for company, and a pen for a voice. Who is more entitled to those privileges than I?
Julie Berry (All the Truth That's in Me)
Purpose of progress is to lift all humanity, not to pamper the elites' moronity.
Abhijit Naskar (Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth)
If I wanted to use a platform controlled by mindless, privileged, entitled, pestilential, white terrorists, I'd have gone for Truth social.
Abhijit Naskar
Despite the fact that life owes us nothing, it gifts us everything. And if such selflessness were the hallmark of our lives, we would handily transform everyone’s life.
Craig D Lounsbrough
Being human in our world is synonymous with being included into the framework of society. Humanity entitles one to certain rights and privileges, but also implies voluntary acceptance of laws and rules of conduct. It transcends mere biology. It's a choice and therefore belongs solely to the individual. In essence, if a person feels they are human, then they are.
Ilona Andrews (Magic Bleeds (Kate Daniels, #4))
The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.
Margaret Atwood
I was too selfish to have a child before I was ready for one, and there's no shame in admitting that. Women should be selfish about our choices, for as long as we have the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness in women isn't the great crime that people like to pretend it is. We are as entitled as men to prioritise ourselves and our desires, and we are as capable as men of knowing what's best for us. Why is everyone so pathologically terrified of selfish women? The word is thrown around like an insult, as if the worst thing a woman could possibly do (aside from being fat, having sex with whomever she pleases and whenever, swearing, having an abortion, drinking alcohol, standing up for herself and being a working mother) is to decide that her life matters. But women are allowed to be selfish. It shouldn't be considered a 'privilege' to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It's a right that, by and large, has been stolen from us and used to keep us in thrall to a paternalistic body that pretends to know what's best for us but is really only interested in maintaining the order that has proved best for them.
Clementine Ford (Fight Like a Girl)
becomes: Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to them?
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
Nobody is fit to rule anybody else. It is not alleged that Mankind is perfect, or that merely through his/her natural goodness (or lack of same) he/she should (or should not) be permitted to rule. Rule as such causes abuse. There are no superpeople nor privileged classes who are above 'imperfect Mankind' and are capable or entitled to rule the rest of us. Submission to slavery means surrender of life.
Albert Meltzer (Anarchism: Arguments For and Against)
But understanding nothing, or very little of the world, and having no desire to understand more than you already do, well, that invites entitlement. What was a privilege becomes a right. And that, I think, is dangerous.
Josiah Bancroft (The Fall of Babel (The Books of Babel #4))
Rich people entitlement is a hell of a drug. It doesn’t even occur to them that they’ll get busted, because they brown nose all the right assholes at the golf course. Schmooze the right judges. Retain the right attorneys.
Jess Whitecroft (The Last Single Man in Texas)
Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off narcissist. Toxic, entitled, and narcissistic people cannot manage their emotions, and, when anything threatens their sense of order, privilege, entitlement, justice, or convenience, they lash out explosively.
Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
An ambassador from any country is always conscious of the fact that he has a tremendous responsibility because he is the representative by whom his country is going to be judged. And to us is given the privilege and responsibility of being the representatives of the Son of God in this world. We stand for him, people judge him by what they see in us, and they are perfectly entitled to do so because we are the ones through whom and in whom he is glorified. Do we, I wonder, always realize this?
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Possession is a ruse and entitlement is a fallacy. Therefore, I am left with the singular fact that everything is a gift. And if I have one gift to give in exchange for these many gifts, maybe it’s the commitment to treat everything in like manner.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Estimating that his merits would never earn him a penny or the position he coveted and felt entitled to, he decided to carve out a career for himself, cultivating a click of like-minded chums with home to exchange privileges, excluding those he envied.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Labyrinth of the Spirits)
Male privilege" is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It's a sense of entitlement that's unique to those who have been raised male in most cultures - it's notably absent in most girls and women.
Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us)
These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable, or otherwise, on those entitled to bear them. In the present—and still more in the future condition of society—they imply, not privilege, but restriction.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)
Citizenship, after all, is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities—and they don’t worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges.1
Victor Davis Hanson (The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America)
women are expected to give traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
Ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation to the prejudice and oppression of another is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy...An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.
Benjamin Franklin
Studies show there is but one circumstance in which men’s and women’s household work will tend to approach parity: when she works full-time and he is unemployed. And even then, the operative word is approach. She will still do a bit more. Equality is elusive, even in the supposedly egalitarian U.S. context.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
A wealthy CEO could justify his or her advantages to a lower paid worker on a factory floor as: "I am not worthier then you nor morally deserving of the privileged position I hold. My generous compensation package is simply an incentive necessary to induce me and others like me, to develop our talents for the benefit of all. It is not your fault that you lack the talent society needs, nor is it my doing that I have such talents in abundance. This is why some of my income is taxed away to help people like you. I do not morally deserve my superior pay and position, but I am entitled to them under fair rules of social cooperation, and remember, you and I would have agreed to these rules had we thought about the matter before we knew who would land on top and whom at the bottom. So please do not resent me, my privileges make you better off than you would otherwise be, the inequality you find galling is for your own good.
Michael J. Sandel (The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?)
by] torture for the rest of their slutty lives.” The sad truth is that, like many oppressors, incels perceive themselves as being the vulnerable ones. They feel like the true victims, even as they lash out violently against others. And they feel they are in the right, even as they commit the most deplorable acts of wrongdoing.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
In contrast to misogyny, I take sexism to be the theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
We must remember that the people of all the States are entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the several States. We should bear this in mind, and act in such a way as to say nothing insulting or irritating. I would inculcate this idea, so that we may not, like the Pharisees set ourselves up to be better than other people.
Abraham Lincoln (An Autobiography of Abraham Lincoln)
Many Arabs have fair skin, and my own is more olive than brown. This racial ambiguity affords me some degree of acceptance—until my ethnic background is inevitably brought to the foreground. Whiteness, then, is more than skin color. It is, as race scholar Paul Kivel describes, “a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from
Ruby Hamad (White Tears Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Colour)
Being a man is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is a surrender of our priority. It is a laying down of our lives, not physically but inwardly—our preferences, our pleasures, sometimes even our dreams. Our version of Witold Pilecki’s medals comes in the lives we offer to God, lives we have bled and sweated and prayed and given ourselves for. This is what it means to be a man.
Stephen Mansfield (Mansfield's Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self)
The same touchy sense of personal honor that is at the root of Achilles' wrath still governs relations between man and man in modern Greece; Greek society still fosters in the individual a fierce sense of his privileges, no matter how small, of his rights, no matter how confined, of his personal worth, no matter how low. And to defend it, he will stop, like Achilles, at nothing.
Bernard Knox (The Oldest Dead White European Males & Other Reflections on the Classics)
Physical deprivation and hunger are one thing; the poverty of the mind and psyche is quite another. Crashing Costco to find bulk beans and rice is not the same as flash-mobbing for Air Jordans and iPhones. How odd that our cultural elite and our dependent poor are somewhat alike, in a symbiotic relationship in which the latter guilt-trip the former for entitlements, with the assurance that the top of the pyramid is safe and free to fritter about far from those they worry about. No wonder those in between who lack the romance of the poor and the privileges and power of the elite are shrinking. We are entering the age of the bread-and-circuses Coliseum: luxury box seats for the fleshy senatorial class, free food and tickets for the rest—and the shrinking middle out in the sand of the arena providing the entertainment.
Victor Davis Hanson (The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction (Victor Davis Hanson Collection Book 2))
When affluent people speak of the underprivileged, they rarely thank their lucky stars that they are privileged, let alone consider that they might be overprivileged. Privilege is their blind spot.7 It is invisible and they don’t think twice about it; they justify their social position as something they are entitled to. In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary.
Carol Tavris (Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts)
For generations, work – for all but a privileged elite – meant a form of servitude. Employees were supplicants without rights or protection – Bob Cratchits reliant on the goodwill of their bosses to secure a day off or a pay rise. But over the past century a revolution has taken place in the control people have over their working lives. In the west, jobs have become part of an assumed right to self-actualisation. By this creed, a job is part of who we are and we are entitled not simply to a salary but also to satisfaction. The
Leyla Boulton (The Fifty Ideas that shaped Business Today)
What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a maudlin reconciliation of love and glory — but the whole truth, naked, cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress, and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their masters!" He
Edith Wharton (Edith Wharton: Collection of 115 Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
I know it’s hard for you, given that no one has ever helped you tolerate feelings of disappointment or frustration, and because you were led to believe that you were superior to other people and entitled to special privileges. You were taught that the rules for everyone else don’t really apply to you. So it isn’t your fault, Louis. But in order to have the kinds of relationships you long for, you must work on these beliefs and behaviors or you’ll keep driving people away from you. Let’s try it again: tell me about the disappointment you feel when our time is up.
Wendy T. Behary (Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving with the Self-Absorbed)
In order to live this way - free to create, free to explore - you must possess a fierce sense of personal entitlement. Creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that - merely by being here - you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own. The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement 'the arrogance of belonging,' and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life. Without this arrogance of belonging, you will never be able to take any creative risks whatsoever. Without it, you will never push yourself out of the suffocating insulation of personal safety and into the frontiers of the beautiful and unexpected. It is a divine force that will actually take you out of yourself and allow you to engage more fully with life. Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection). The arrogance of belonging pulls you out of the darkest depths of self-hatred - not by saying 'I am the greatest!' but merely by saying 'I am here!
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Power Distance Index” (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?” To what extent do the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?” How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges?
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
I believe in the brotherhood of man, not merely the brotherhood of white men but the brotherhood of all men before the law. . . . In giving the Negro the rights which are theirs we are only acting in accord with our ideals of a true democracy. . . . The majority of our Negro people find but cold comfort in shanties and tenements. Surely, as free men, they are entitled to something better than this. . . . It is our duty to see that the Negroes in our locality have increased opportunities to exercise their privilege as free men.” With these words, my father was saying what he truly believed.
Margaret Truman (Harry Truman)
When accused of misogynistic behavior, men often respond by invoking their recognition of the humanity of their wives, sisters, mothers, or other female relatives. Far better that a man realize that no woman belongs to him—and that he is not entitled to have any woman’s love, care, and admiration in an asymmetrical moral relationship. It is not hard, upon reflection, to recognize the obvious fact that a woman is fully human. The real challenge may be in recognizing that she is fully a human being, and not just a human giver of love, sex, and moral succor. She is allowed to be her own person, and to be with other people.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
Men like my father, and men like him who attend Trump rallies, join misogynistic subcultures, populate some of the most hateful groups in the world, and are prisoners of toxic masculinity, an artificial construct whose expectancies are unattainable, thus making them exceedingly fragile and injurious to others, not to mention themselves. The illusion convinces them from an early age that men deserve to be privileged and entitled, that women and men who don’t conform to traditional standards are second-class persons, are weak and thus detestable. This creates a tyrannical patriarchal system that tilts the world further in favor of men, and, as a side effect, accounts for a great deal of crimes, including harassment, physical and emotional abuse, rape, and even murder. These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price. The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.
Jared Yates Sexton (The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making)
In the most egregious instances, women will effectively be punished for being, and claiming to be, the victims of misogyny. They will then be systematically disbelieved and maligned, notwithstanding strong evidence of the wrongdoing they have suffered. In 2009, for example, a young woman in Washington State who told police she had been raped at knifepoint was fined $500 for supposedly filing a false report—a report that, it later turned out, had been accurate. This came to light in 2011 because the rapist, who had a distinctive egg-shaped birthmark on his calf, was subsequently accused of rape by another female victim in a nearby district.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
I want my daughter to know that she is entitled to be powerful and, on occasion, to compete with other people, including privileged boys and men. I want her to know that if she does end up winning or otherwise outranking them, she may well be entitled to occupy a position of power or authority over them. I want her to be a kind and fearless leader. I want her, of course, to be a graceful loser. I want her to be communally minded and altruistic. At the same time, I want her to feel entitled to make mistakes, moral mistakes included. I want her to know, unlike so many girls and women, that she is lovable and forgivable, even if and when she falters. I want her to be prepared to make amends and admit to her mistakes, fully and freely, when she inevitably makes them.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.
Daniel Walker Howe (What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848)
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances. It just means that you’re not special. Often, it’s the realization - that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain - that is the first and most important step toward solving them. But for some reason, it appears that more and more people, particularly young people, are forgetting this. Numerous professors and educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience and an excess of selfish demands in today’s young people. It’s not uncommon now for books to be removed from the class is curriculum for no other reason then they made someone feel bad. Speakers and professors are shouted down and banned from campuses for in fractions as simple as suggesting that maybe some Halloween costumes really aren’t that offensive. School counsellors note that more students than ever are exhibiting severe signs of emotional distress over what are otherwise run-of-the-mill daily college experiences, such as an argument with her roommate, or getting a low grade in the class. It’s strange that in an age when we are more connected than ever, entitlement seems to be at an all time high. Something about recent technology seems to allow our insecurities to run amok like never before. The more freedom were given to express ourselves, the more we want to be free of having to deal with anyone who may disagree with us or upset us. The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist. The easier and more problem free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.
Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
If, in the exigencies of war, industry makes too great a demand on our man-power, then we must use the man-power of the territories which we have occupied. To deserve its place in history, our people must be above all a people of warriors. This implies both privileges and obligations, the obligation of submitting to a most rigorous upbringing and the privilege of the healthy enjoyment of life. If a German soldier is expected to be ready to sacrifice his life without demur, then he is entitled to love freely and without restriction. In life, battle and love go hand in hand, and the inhibited little bourgeois must be content with the crumbs which remain. But if the warrior is to be kept in fighting trim, he must not be pestered with religious precepts which ordain abstinence of the flesh. A healthyminded man simply smiles when a saint of the Catholic Church like St. Anthony bids him eschew the greatest joy that life has to give, and offers him the solace of self-mortification and castigation in its place.
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
Mainstream US culture prompted this sense of belonging to some of its citizens - those who were white, who had secure enough jobs to be consumers, and who felt entitled to the historical wealth of the country despite the horrible toll some of it had taken on others. Like my parents, people wanted to put the difficulties of the past behind them, ignoring the legacies of those difficulties. They signed onto a future that was bright, and in which they were privileged. They were better-off because they were better people , the reasoning generally went, omitting the point that many such opportunities had often been purchased at other people's expense. Once people signed on to a worldview and its spokespersons, it was hard to shake their perception of the world as it was constantly reinforced by a selective input of information. They believed only what their leaders said, regardless of whether or not it was firmly grounded in fact. Remembering my earnest childhood patriotism, I called this phenomenon a sense of allegiance.
Cathy Wilkerson
Women are also rejected. Women also spend their teen years pining after dreamy boys who will never love them back. You don’t see us going around murdering people over it. You don’t see us setting up internet communities for the purpose of talking about how evil and shallow men are for not taking us to pound town. Women don’t go around killing men who don’t like them, because if you’re a woman in this society, a boy not liking you is the least of your problems. It is nowhere near the shittiest thing you’re going to be expected to “just deal with” in your life — one of those things being the fact that we are expected to “just deal with” how men are sometimes going to murder a bunch of people because they felt entitled to romantic attention from women. We are expected to “deal with” that, while never bringing up the terms “male privilege” or “male entitlement” or “toxic masculinity” and why those things so often lead to mass murder, on account of how that might really hurt the feelings of the men who have been gracious enough to not go on killing sprees.
Robyn Pennacchia
In one representative study of the situation in the nation today, the sociologists Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan found that for male-female partners who both worked full-time (roughly forty-hour weeks), first-time parenthood increased a man’s workload at home by about ten hours per week. Meanwhile, the increased workload for women was about twenty hours. So motherhood took double the toll as fatherhood, workwise. Moreover, much of the new work that fathers did take on in these situations was the comparatively “fun” work of engagement with their children—for example, playing with the baby. Fathers did this for four hours per week, on average, while dropping their number of hours of housework by five hours per week during the same time period. Mothers decreased their hours of housework by only one hour per week—while adding about twenty-one hours of child-rearing labor, including fifteen hours of physical child care—for instance, changing diapers and bathing the baby. And mothers still did more by way of infant engagement: about six hours per week, on average.
Kate Manne (Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women)
One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under “patriarchy” (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women’s modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women’s misbehavior as more serious than men’s. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today’s feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind? In return for women’s holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I’m not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them. Without feminine modesty, however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with “good sex,” a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. “Good sex,” by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum. The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same rape culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It’s not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the rape culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent — in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today’s preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn’t it?
Harvey Mansfield Jr.
From Smith's principle that labor is the true measure of price—or, as Warren phrased it, that cost is the proper limit of price—these three men (Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx) made the following deductions: that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income (leaving out, of course, gift, inheritance, etc.); that all who derive income from any other source abstract it directly or indirectly from the natural and just wage of labor; that this abstracting process generally takes one of three forms, interest, rent, and profit; that these three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital; that, capital being simply stored-up labor which has already received its pay in full, its use ought to be gratuitous, on the principle that labor is the only basis of price; that the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more; that the only reason why the banker, the stockholder, the landlord, the manufacturer, and the merchant are able to exact usury from labor lies in the fact that they are backed by legal privilege, or monopoly; and that the only way to secure to labor the enjoyment of its entire product, or natural wage, is to strike down monopoly.
Frank H Brooks (The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908)
Of all of Hofstede’s Dimensions, though, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the “Power Distance Index” (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?” To what extent do the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?” How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges? “In low–power distance index countries,” Hofstede wrote in his classic text Culture’s Consequences: power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay. I once heard a Swedish (low PDI) university official state that in order to exercise power he tried not to look powerful. Leaders may enhance their informal status by renouncing formal symbols. In (low PDI) Austria, Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky was known to sometimes take the streetcar to work. In 1974, I actually saw the Dutch (low PDI) prime minister, Joop den Uyl, on vacation with his motor home at a camping site in Portugal. Such behavior of the powerful would be very unlikely in high-PDI Belgium or France.*
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Article IV The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them. If any person guilty of, or charged with, treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any of the United States, he shall, upon demand of the Governor or executive power of the State from which he fled, be delivered up and removed to the State having jurisdiction of his offense. Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other State.
Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
Going back to the place where you are from is always fraught, memories scattered like broken glass on every pavement, be careful where you tread. I meditated, feeling a little guilty that I have the space to. A space for peace, to which everyone is entitled. “It’s alright for you in the back of a car that Hitler used to ride in,” I imagined that drunk bloke saying. I’d have to point out that it wasn’t literally Hitler’s car, that would be a spooky heirloom, but it is all right for me. I do have a life where I can make time to meditate, eat well, do yoga, exercise, reflect, relax. That’s what money buys you. Is it possible for everyone to have that life? Is it possible for anyone to be happy when such rudimentary things are exclusive? They tell you that you ought eat five fruit and veg a day, then seven; I read somewhere once that you should eat as much as ten, face in a trough all day long, chowing on kale. The way these conclusions are reached is that scientists look at a huge batch of data and observe the correlation between the consumption of fruit and veg and longevity. They then conclude that you, as an individual, should eat more fruit and veg. The onus is on you; you are responsible for what you eat. Of course, other conclusions could be drawn from this data. The same people that live these long lives and eat all this fruit and veg are also, in the main, wealthy; they have good jobs, regular holidays, exercise, and avoid the incessant stress of poverty. Another, more truthful, more frightening conclusion we could reach then is that we should have a society where the resources enjoyed by the fruit-gobbling elite are shared around and the privileges, including the fruit and veg, enjoyed by everybody. With this conclusion the obligation is not on you as an individual to obediently skip down to Waitrose and buy more celery, it is on you as a member of society to fight for a fairer system where more people have access to resources.
Russell Brand (Revolution)
I think back to this so often in trying to make sense of the world - how there are people who have so much and people who have so little, and how I fit in with them both. Often I find myself trying to bridge the two worlds, to show people, either the people with so much or the people with so little, that everything is yours and everything is not yours. I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based n class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves. Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anyone else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves. […] I’ve seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. Everywhere, and especially at both extremes, you can find monsters. It’s at the extremes that people are most scared—scared of deprivation, one one end; and scared of their privilege, on the other. With privilege comes a nearly avoidable egoism and so much shame, and often the coping mechanism is to give. This is great and necessary, but giving, as a framework, creates problems. You give, I take; you take, I give—both scenarios establish hierarchy. Both instill entitlement. The only road to equality—a sense of common humanity; peace—is sharing, my mother’s orange. When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you. When we share, you are not insisting on being my savior. Claire and I always looked for the sharers, the people who just said, ‘I have sugar, I have water. Let’s share water. Let’s not make charity about it.
Clemantine Wamariya (The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After)
In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.” In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement.
Anonymous
The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? … It is absolutely certain that the African race were not included under the name of citizens of a State… and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. The government did
Allen C. Guelzo (Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction)
Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government. The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It's about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It's about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work--the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It's about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics)
As it has expanded, the Western state has tended to give people more rights—the right to vote, the right to education and health care and welfare. Things like a university education that a century ago were regarded as a white, male, wealthy privilege are now seen as a public service, in some cases a free entitlement, for everybody.
John Micklethwait (The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State)
the fall of 1944. I went back to the university; I received the scholarship, to which I was entitled for earning top grades and I tutored some Russian students in English. However, life was joyless, food was scarce and whatever was available was intolerable. By the end of September, after Rosh Hashannah, Father got sick with pneumonia. Since he suffered all his life with asthma, pneumonia was a dangerous disease. Penicillin was a new drug in the West, unavailable in the Soviet Union. There was sulfa but only for people with special privileges like party members or military personnel. We were neither.
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)