Privileged Money Quotes

The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.

I don't care if your dad is the Sultan of Brunei. You happened to be born into a privileged family. What you do with that truth is completely up to you. I'm here because I want to be with you. But if I didn't, all the money in the world wouldn't have changed my feelings for you.

The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving, or that he'd spend all of his money to save money. Why should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?

To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God).

...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.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

The words consent of the governed have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal. As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are ‘liberal’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign.

He called me careless because he didn't have the words to sort out how jealous he was of my money and my freedom and how very few people in the world could act as I did.

It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul. For the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe that leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

He doesn't need any money , all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.

They are talking like fools. They are saying that two and two make nothing. They are saying that a man will have to die to in order to protect his life. If you agree to fight you agree to die. Now if you die to protect your life you aren't alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn't say I will spend all my money in order to save money. He doesn't say I will burn my house to down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?

Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

To me bathtubs are the epitome of luxury. Either you have no money to own one or you have no time to use one.

turn yourself into a corporation: one of the most powerful fictions in which Westerners chose to believe, endowed with privileges and protections, and yet blissfully easy to create.

Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

The sucker has always tried to get something for nothing, and the appeal in all booms is always frankly to the gambling instinct aroused by cupidity and spurred by a pervasive prosperity. People who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this sordid earth.

Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.

History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.

Our ability to travel is a privilege. But it is also a choice. Money is time. Where do we spend out time? Wilderness is not my leisure or my recreation. It is my sanity.

Alongside the ledger of atrocity, I keep another. The Palestinian doctor who would not abandon his patients, even as the bombs closed in. The Icelandic writer who raised money to get the displaced out of Gaza. The American doctors and nurses who risked their lives to go treat the wounded in the middle of a killing field. The puppet-maker who, injured and driven from his home, kept making dolls to entertain the children. The congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference. The protesters, the ones who gave up their privilege, their jobs, who risked something, to speak out. The people who filmed and photographed and documented all this, even as it happened to them, even as they buried their dead. It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.

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.

We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.

I know this kind of girl,” Grace was saying. “It’s the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven.

Money is the root of all goodness. To talk disparagingly about money is the privilege of those who have money. There are also those people who state matter-of-factly that "money isn't everything". This statement is also true, but only so long as one has money.

Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light.

His whole business model privileges the already privileged. Those who can spend exorbitant amounts of time and money on self-care and making themselves beautiful.

The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.

If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy.

For each now strives to isolate his person as much as possible from the others, wishing to experience within himself life's completeness, yet from all his efforts there results not life's completeness but a complete suicide, for instead of discovering the true nature of their being they lapse into total solitariness. For in our era all are isolated into individuals, each retires solitary within his burrow, each withdraws from the other, conceals himself and that which he possesses, and ends by being rejected of men and by rejecting them. He ammasses wealth in solitariness, thinking: how strong I am now and how secure, yet he does not know, the witless one, that the more he ammasses, the further he will sink into suicidal impotence. For he has become accustomed to relying upon himself alone has isolated himself from the whole as an individual, has trained his soul not to trust in help from others, in human beings and mankind, and is fearful only of losing his money and privileges he has acquired. In every place today the human mind is mockingly starting to lose its awareness of the fact that a person's true security consists not in his own personal, solitary effort, but in the common integrity of human kind.

At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.

But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom--the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is regulated to private, individual acts of charity or left to the churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America's god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.

Isn't it incredible?, I said. There was nothing incredible about it, she said. I thought it was so because I spoke English, because I read books, and because my parents paid for my education and my upkeep. For me everything was surprising, the world was full of wonder, the most random idiotic occurrence was incredible because my luck made it so. For people like her, for the poor, the only incredible thing in the whole world was money and the mysterious ways in which it worked.

Willingly embracing the emptiness of the tomb is more difficult for those of us in places of privilege. We have so much “stuff,” so many activities and endless sources of distraction and busyness to fill any potential emptiness, that our pretense is better fortified against any attempts to expose it, whether through circumstance or intentionality. This is why, in part, Jesus speaks so strongly against the love of money. He did not demonize money itself, but recognized how easily we become enslaved to a different master, in bondage to mammon, instead of following Christ in loving service of God and others.

I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts mad in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.

John Kennedy’s family was rich, and he had enjoyed all the privileges that money could buy — a fine Harvard education, world travel, material possessions, leisure, and his father’s contacts.

Never having experienced inequality, therefore, the majority of straight white men will be absolutely oblivious to their own advantages – not because they must necessarily be insensitive, sexist, racist, homophobic or unaware of the principles of equality; but because they have been told, over and over again, that there is no inequality left for them – or anyone else – to experience – and everything they have experienced up to that point will only have proved them right. Let the impact of that sink in for a moment. By teaching children and teenagers that equality already exists, we are actively blinding the group that most benefits from inequality – straight white men – to the prospect that it doesn’t. Privilege to them feels indistinguishable from equality, because they’ve been raised to believe that this is how the world behaves for everyone. And because the majority of our popular culture is straight-white-male-dominated, stories that should be windows into empathy for other, less privileged experiences have instead become mirrors, reflecting back at them the one thing they already know: that their lives both are important and free from discrimination. And this hurts men. It hurts them by making them unconsciously perpetrate biases they’ve been actively taught to despise. It hurts them by making them complicit in the distress of others. It hurts them by shoehorning them into a restrictive definition masculinity from which any and all deviation is harshly punished. It hurts them by saying they will always be inferior parents and caregivers, that they must always be active and aggressive even when they long for passivity and quietude, that they must enjoy certain things like sports and beer and cars or else be deemed morally suspect. It hurts them through a process of indoctrination so subtle and pervasive that they never even knew it was happening , and when you’ve been raised to hate inequality, discovering that you’ve actually been its primary beneficiary is horrifying – like learning that the family fortune comes from blood money. Blog post 4/12/2012: Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men

We'd all turn our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us.

Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swathes of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.

You weren't the perfect father but that's okay because -- probably nobody's a perfect father. No family's perfect, either. I was lucky. I was privileged. Not because of the big house and the money, but because you gave me a lot of yourself. You taught me, you showed me, you encouraged me -- you never lied to me and you never demanded that I be anything I’m not. I didn’t imitate you because you insisted that I do so, but because I wanted to. Of all the men I knew, you were most worthy of imitation. Then I blamed you for letting me be who I was. Pretty dumb. You and Alfred gave me a home and you gave me what we don't mention. The L word. You were the best family I could have had. Thanks.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory. An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe,is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less. Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women are not as smart as men, as strong as men, or as capable as men. We render half the human race invisible and call it natural. We tolerate war and massacre, mayhem and holocaust to right the wrongs that men say need righting and then tell women to bear up and accept their fate in silence when the crime is against them. What’s worse, we have applauded it all—the militarism, the profiteering, and the sexisms—in the name of patriotism, capitalism, and even religion. We consider it a social problem, not a spiritual one. We think it has something to do with modern society and fail to imagine that it may be something wrong with the modern soul. We treat it as a state of mind rather than a state of heart. Clearly, there is something we are failing to see.

Are Christians victims of this post-Christian world? No. Sadly, Christians are coconspirators. We embrace modernism’s perks when they serve our own lusts and selfish ambitions. We despise modernism when it crosses lines of our precious moralism. Our cold and hard hearts; our failure to love the stranger; our selfishness with our money, our time, and our home; and our privileged back turned against widows, orphans, prisoners, and refugees mean we are guilty in the face of God of withholding love and Christian witness. And even more serious is our failure to read our Bibles well enough to see that the creation ordinance and the moral law, found first in the Old Testament, is as binding to the Christian as any red letter. Our own conduct condemns our witness to this world.

Arriving at the store, she walked up and down the aisles handling any object her fancy favored. What a wonderful feeling to pick something up, hold it for a moment, feel its contour, run her hand over its surface and then replace it carefully. Her nickel gave her this privilege. If a floor-walker asked whether she intended buying anything, she could say, yes, buy it and show him a thing or two. Money was a wonderful thing, she decided.

Start taking money away from the privileged, and they can turn just as savage as any animal that gets shoved into Philippa’s arena.

Initially, class privilege was not discussed by white women in the women’s movement. They wanted to project an image of themselves as victims and that could not be done by drawing attention to their class. In fact, the contemporary women’s movement was extremely class bound. As a group, white participants did not denounce capitalism. They chose to define liberation using the terms of white capitalist patriarchy, equating liberation with gaining economic status and money power. Like all good capitalists, they proclaimed work as the key to liberation. This emphasis on work was yet another indication of the extent to which the white female liberationists’ perception of reality was totally narcissistic, classist, and racist. Implicit in the assertion that work was the key to women’s liberation was a refusal to acknowledge the reality that, for masses of American working class women, working for pay neither liberated them from sexist oppression nor allowed them to gain any measure of economic independence.

Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.

If you have debts, you are poor; if you have assets, you are fortunate; if you have money, you are privileged; if you have peace, you are rich; and if you have contentment, you are wealthy. If you have greed, you are poor; if you have faith, you are fortunate; if you have joy, you are privileged; if you have charity, you are rich; and if you have love, you are wealthy. If you have ignorance, you are poor; if you have education, you are fortunate; if you have understanding, you are privileged; if you have knowledge, you are rich; and if you have wisdom, you are wealthy. If you have no one, you are poor; if you have an acquaintance, you are fortunate; if you have a friend, you are privileged; if you have a lover, you are rich; and if you have a soulmate, you are wealthy.

You mistake me, Alexandra. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.” She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.” “Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward. This was what Alex’s mother had never managed to grasp. Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.

You're here because you know what it's like to feel powerless. Everyone you see here has been given every privilege that money can buy, but at the end of the day, there are some privileges that money can't buy. Money doesn't keep people from telling girls who look like me to go back to the other side of the border. And no matter what your family name is, or how white your skin, I'm willing to bet that there are still people who tell you to smile, because you look so pretty when you smile." She paused, just for an instant. "we all play by rules our brothers will never even have to know. "You want to know why we go cliff-diving and off-roading and drag you out to abandoned islands in the night?" Victoria's voice was no louder, but her delivery was suddenly crystal clear. "Because we can. Because when people say that well-behaved women rarely make history, they leave out the little tidbit that the women who do make history rarely do so alone.

What you love is a clue to your calling and talent. As you assume the responsibilities of the present, take time to enjoy the privileges available to you now. Today's action will speak better of tomorrow and more.

Whoever can there bring sufficient proof, that he hath strictly observed the laws of his country for seventy-three moons, hath a claim to certain privileges, according to his quality and condition of life, with a proportionable sum of money out of a fund appropriated for that use: he likewise acquires the title of Snilpall, or Legal, which is added to his name, but doth not descent to his posterity. And these people thought it a prodigious defect of policy aoung us, when I told the, that our laws were enforced only by penalities, without any mention of a reward.

Millennials: We lost the genetic lottery. We graduated high school into terrorist attacks and wars. We graduated college into a recession and mounds of debt. We will never acquire the financial cushion, employment stability, and material possessions of our parents. We are often more educated, experienced, informed, and digitally fluent than prior generations, yet are constantly haunted by the trauma of coming of age during the detonation of the societal structure we were born into. But perhaps we are overlooking the silver lining. We will have less money to buy the material possessions that entrap us. We will have more compassion and empathy because our struggles have taught us that even the most privileged can fall from grace. We will have the courage to pursue our dreams because we have absolutely nothing to lose. We will experience the world through backpacking, couch surfing, and carrying on interesting conversations with adventurers in hostels because our bank accounts can't supply the Americanized resorts. Our hardships will obligate us to develop spiritual and intellectual substance. Maybe having roommates and buying our clothes at thrift stores isn't so horrible as long as we are making a point to pursue genuine happiness.

They are saying that a man will have to die to protect his life. if you agree to fight you agree to die. Now if you die to protect your life you aren't alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn't say I will spend all my money in order to save my money. He doesn't say I will burn my house down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living? There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.

That is why an expiring form of money is crucial. Power passed from generation to generation in the abstract form of wealth leads to privilege and corruption. Money must not be hoarded for its own sake but must be continually employed for a fruitful purpose.

Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honoured by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Working-class and poor women are also living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.

Some children are threatened with loss of privileges such as money, cell phones, cars or even eviction from home if they do not 'toe-the-line' and 'act straight'. I don't think parents who do such things consider for a moment the kind of emotional damage they are doing to their children - or thinking beyond their own feelings about the situation - which will not change or go away simply because of their denial.

Nightbitch resolved to demand things- all sorts of things. To ask. To not assume she had to cook the dinner and do the night-nights and clean the house and pay the bills and buy the presents and send the cards and schedule to appointments and keep track of every last thing all by herself. This was, after all, a partnership, wasn’t it? This was, after all, the modern era, empowerment and feminism and all that, and she had not been taking advantage of any of it because, she discovered as she thought further, she did not have a job. Or, rather, she did not have a job that paid any money whatsoever; in fact, it was a drain on money, represented negative money, this mothering job. Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying home each and every day devoting herself completely to motherhood and nothing else, she had felt, ever since she stepped down from her position at the gallery, that she was in no place to demand anything, He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it’s cute you’re a mom, and go do your thing, but, honestly, it’s not that hard; you’re probably not all that smart or interesting , but good for you for feeling fulfilled by mothering.

It’s just … in that moment I was pissed you were so eager to go. I hate going, but I thank Creator each time that you’re not with me. I keep hoping your privileges will keep you safe. Your last name. Your light skin. Your money. Your size, even.” Auntie spots Jamie heading back from the grill area and finishes with “I’m thankful for you having those advantages. But I get mad and scared because my Black and Ojibwe daughters don’t.

In the end, a person is only know by the impact he or she has on others. The Gift of Work: He who loves his work never labors. The Gift of Money: Money is nothing more than a tool. It can be a force for good, a force for evil, or simple be idle. The Gift of Friends: It is a wealthy person, indeed, who calculates riches not in gold but in friends. The Gift of Learning: Education is a lifelong journey whose destination expands as you travel. The desire and hunger for education is the key to real learning. The Gift of Problems: Problems can only be avoided by exercising good judgment. Good judgment can only be gained by experiencing life's problems. The Gift of Family: Some people are born into wonderful families. Others have to find or create them. Being a member of a family is a priceless privilege which costs nothing but love. The Gift of Laughter: Laughter is good medicine for the soul. Our world is desperately in need of more such medicine. The Gift of Dreams: Faith is all that dreamers need to see into the future. The Gift of Giving: The only way you can truly get more out of life for yourself is to give part of yourself away. One of the key principles in giving, is that the gift must be yours to give-either something you earned or created or maybe, simply, part of yourself. The Gift of Gratitude: In those times when we yearn to have more in our lives, we should dwell on the things we already have. In doing so, we will often find that our lives are already full to overflowing. The Golden List: Every morning before getting up visualize a golden tablet on which is written ten things in your life you are especially thankful for. The Gift of a Day: Life at its essence boils down to one day at a time. Today is the Day! If we can learn how to live one day to its fullest, our lives will be rich and meaningful. The Gift of Love: Love is a treasure for which we can never pay. The only way we keep it is to give it away. The Ultimate Gift: In the end, life lived to its fullest is its own ultimate gift.

I hope to risk things all my life." "Oh, Margaret, most dangerous." "But after all," she continued with a smile, "there's never any great risk as long as you have money." "Oh, shame! What a shocking speech!" "Money pads the edges of things," said Miss Schlegel. "God help those who have none.

Flint's pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed — him all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal

Vince and I had reached the point where there was nothing else we could think of to do with the taco wrapper, and since he refused to draw straws for the privilege of telling Deborah, I'd been forced to make the call to give her the news that we'd come up blank. And three minutes later, here she was, striding into our lab like avenging fury. "Goddamn it," she said before she was even all the way in the room, "I need something from you!" "Maybe a sedative?" Vince suggested, and for once I thought he was right on the money.

[Friendship] It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that. You know it. Everybody agrees this to be a manifest truth so self-evident as to need to repetition. What is strange to me is that, despite the fact that the world knows this, it does not want to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as if it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading the high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

All women should feel as Sex Subjects if they want and choose so without fear of repressions, condemnations and put down and without the need to pay them for that. Being freely a sexy and seductive woman is allowed only for few privileged professions: actresses, dancers, models, singers, prostitutes. They all do it for work. You can pay for them being sexy. If a sexy woman is openly adored by a man, the woman remains as a woman, she is not turning into a table, a cup or a bill of money. She is still the Subject who knows her power.

A speeding fine lets me know it’s OK to break the law, just so long as I’m willing pay money for the privilege to do so.

it was unthinkable to sell land, was to sell communal privileges or commute labor services and bonds of serfdom for a money rent.

There’s enough of the social climber in most people so that they fall for this stuff and consider it a privilege to be admitted to a place that specializes in taking their money.

As far as I'm concerned, "liberal" is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle class people can live high on the hog, take vacations in Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are "liberals." But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull of that liberal mask and you're talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so called under privileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges

The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due—that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege—many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed.

When I was growing up, my parents had created for my brother and me the perfect upper middle-class lifestyle. We had everything we needed, and most things we wanted. We took piano lessons. We went to summer camp. We swam at the local country club. We had college funds. And while what I should have learned from living a relatively privileged childhood was the value of hard work and frugality, what I learned instead was that money was not something with which I needed to be overly concerned. If and when I needed it, it would magically appear. Like a genie.

About a week earlier I had finished a book (on the Hell's Angels, scheduled this fall by Random House) and I felt that I needed about a week of total degeneration to cool out my system. To this end I went down to Big Sur and Monterery and filled my body with every variety of booze and drug available to modern man. For six or seven days I ran happily amok - spending money, sitting in baths, and futilely hunting wild boar with a .44 Magnum revolver. At one point I gave my car away to a man who paid $25 for the privilege of pushing it off a 400-foot cliff. - to Max Scherr editor, Berkley Barb 7/20/1966

When love of one’s people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods. As we have mentioned, Ernest Becker wrote that in a society that has lost the reality of God, many people will look to romantic love to give them the fulfillment they once found in religious experience. Nietzsche, however, believed it would be money that would replace God. But there is another candidate to fill this spiritual vacuum. We can also look to politics. We can look upon our political leaders as “messiahs,” our political policies as saving doctrine, and turn our political activism into a kind of religion.

I suggest a Money Market account with no penalties and full check-writing privileges for your emergency fund. We have a large emergency fund for our household in a mutual-fund company Money Market account. Wherever you get your mutual funds, look at the website to find Money Market accounts that pay interest equal to one-year CDs. I haven’t found bank Money Market accounts to be competitive. The FDIC does not insure the mutual-fund Money Market accounts, but I keep mine there anyway because I’ve never known one to fail. Keep in mind that the interest earned is not the main thing. The main thing is that the money is available to cover emergencies. Your wealth building is not going to happen in this account; that will come later, in other places. This account is more like insurance against rainy days than it is investing.

In my work as a bridge builder, I’ve seen how, time and time again conversations about reconciliation stall when the topic of righting the wrongs comes up. Terms such as reparations, affirmative action, white privilege, and Black Lives Matter are non-starters for so many folks, in part because they disrupt the listener. They remind him or her that making things right costs something, often power, position, or money.

If you have a voice, you have influence to spread. If you have relationships, you have hearts to guide. If you know young people, you have futures to mold. If you have privilege, you have power to share. If you have money, you have support to give. If you have a ballot, you have policy to shape. If you have pain, you have empathy to offer. If you have freedom, you have others to fight for. If you are alive, you are a leader.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back. This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and against concentrated power and privilege, determined to rid politics of big money, end corporate welfare and crony capitalism, bust up monopolies, stop voter suppression, and strengthen the countervailing power of labor unions, employee-owned corporations, worker cooperatives, state and local banks, and grassroots politics. This agenda is neither right nor left. It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the people, at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money drawing intergalactic traffic through Times Square, money in the limestones and brownstones, money out on West Broadway where white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police. I would see these people at the club, drunken, laughing, challenging breakdancers to battles. They would be destroyed and humiliated in these battles. But afterward they would give dap, laugh, order more beers. They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.

The Russian oligarchic system is the quintessence of statist depravity, where all industry is controlled by a small number of men ruthless enough to rise to the top of a corrupt patronage system, where government serves the interests of elites, money and privilege flow to the top, the people are exploited through a venomous cocktail of brutality and graft, and truth is the enemy of the state. Russian oligarchy is economic survival of the fittest, the ultimate, balls-out Darwinian experiment in wealth consolidation by the most wicked, immoral and dishonest ― government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich at the expense and misery of everyone else.

But this is something quite new!" said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable. "New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years. You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin." "I call that rather cynical." "So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can. Imagine the tragedy last June if Helen and Paul Wilcox had been poor people and could not invoke railways and motor-cars to part them." "That's more like Socialism," said Mrs. Munt suspiciously. "Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one's hand spread open on the table. I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed—from the sea, yes, from the sea. And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we don't want to steal umbrellas ourselves, we forget that below the sea people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and that what's a joke up here is down there reality—

Travel unsettles the appropriate. You’re bound to be inappropriate. Which is probably why I don’t feel the intense embarrassment some do at not being able to speak foreign languages correctly. It seems to me that one of the privileges of travel is never to fit in. And not to fit in, not to be able to, is a kind of freedom. One of the freedoms that money can buy, like buying a hotel room in which one is psychologically unburdened and can act out guilty pleasures, capitalist ones, no doubt.

And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

...she did not have ajob that paid any money whatsoever; in fact, it was a drain on money, represented negative money, this mothering job. Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying hom each and every day and devoting herself to motherhoos and nothing else, she had felt... that she had no place to demand anything. He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it's cute your a mom, and go do your thing, but honestly, it's not that hard; you're probably not all that smart of interesting, but good for you for feeling fulfilled by mothering.

I didn't invent the difficulty of depending on people. It's not a personality flaw of mine. The message is everywhere. The air is saturated with it -- independence and strength and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (an image that is by its very nature impossible.) "Take complete responsibility for your life," they say, as if the external forces don't matter at all. As if it all comes down to personal effort and attitude. As if money, support, and privilege had nothing to do with how your life turns out.

It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess.

Fred was deeply wounded when one of those friends decided that it offended his sense of ethics to socialize with people who came from a background of privilege and wealth. He dropped Fred, which, to Joanne’s annoyance, further worried Fred about his family’s money.

Not pursuing your “own pleasure” on the Sabbath requires self-discipline. You may have to deny yourself of something you might like. If you choose to delight yourself in the Lord, you will not permit yourself to treat it as any other day. Routine and recreational activities can be done some other time. Think of this: In paying tithing, we return one-tenth of our increase to the Lord. In keeping the Sabbath holy, we reserve one day in seven as His. So it is our privilege to consecrate both money and time to Him who lends us life each day.

There may be reasons for allowing a man whose work is exceptionally fruitful—for instance, an inventor—to enjoy a larger income than is enjoyed by the average citizen, but therecan be no good reason for allowing this privilege to descend to his children and grandchildren and so on for ever. The effect is to produce an idle and exceptionally fortunate class, who are influential through their money, and opposed to reform for fear it should be directed against themselves. Their whole habit of thought becomes timid, since they dread being forced to acknowledge that their position is indefensible; yet snobbery and the wish to secure their favor leads almost the whole middle-class to ape their manners and adopt their opinions. In this way they become a poison infecting the outlook of almost all educated people.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making money…but it is likely God will keep you poor, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, and that is a helpless dependence on Him, that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury.

Happiness should not be a struggle nor a privilege , because feelings are priceless. So we cant buy how we feel. You can be happy anytime you want. Stop making money an excuse of why you are not happy. Stop making excuses of why you are not happy, but find reasons why you should be happy

All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.

The new trash who’d suddenly come into money and liked to rub your nose into it? They didn’t care. They didn’t notice. Until one of their own goes ill. Then it’s a sodding emergency. Some privileged prat starts feeling poorly and then it’s call out the Marines, start looking for someone to blame

The most important leaders in the world are parents. The most important teachers in the world are students. The most important artists in the world are children. The most important preachers in the world are disciples. The most important healers in the world are patients. The most important prophets in the world are visionaries. The most powerful are those who shun power. The richest are those who shun money. The most eminent are those who shun titles. The most famous are those who shun fame. The most privileged are those who shun privilege. The most honorable are those who shun honor.

Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster. We weren’t completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We’d had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine. We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same. We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities. In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares. At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. “This is too much!” she said. “You can’t dump all the world’s problems on these kids in one lump!” And he agreed. He was bewildered by it all, but the program had been set up the previous year, and he was the new headmaster, reluctant to interfere. And though we were sick of it and about it, we were greedy for it. We felt privileged there in our protected world and we felt guilty, and this was our punishment.

Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans” by Rob Henderson New York Post, August 3, 2022 In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs. People care a lot about social status. In fact, research indicates that respect and admiration from our peers are even more important than money for our sense of well-being. ...as trendy clothes and other products become more accessible and affordable, there is increasingly less status attached to luxury goods. The upper classes have found a clever solution to this problem: luxury beliefs. These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class. ‘Upper-class people don a luxury belief to separate themselves from the lower class’ ... White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around poor whites. Often members of the upper-class claim that racial disparities stem from inherent advantages held by whites. Yet Asian Americans are more educated, have higher earnings and live longer than whites. Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status. When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt. ... like with diamond rings or designer clothes of old, upper-class people don a luxury belief to separate themselves from the lower class. These beliefs, in turn, produce real, tangible consequences for disadvantaged people, further widening the divide.

The irony, as Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women—the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham.

A wave of irritation washed over her. These privileged men had no idea how easy it was for them, drifting into education knowing their father's money would bail them out - when Stella was saving every penny she had, desperate to get a chance to read for a PhD. Stella was three times as smart as most of them too

War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honor, the selfsacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth. But it’s different today. Few men want to go off and fight. We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology

Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heavens.... But, until then, we must keep the banner flying. Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men's souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.

The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us.

Some call it luck, coincidence, fate, or God’s hand. I call it grace: the acknowledgment that there’s more in this world than just ourselves, and that perhaps a higher power gives us both the privilege of this life as well as the gifts of insight and guidance when we’re open to them. It’s amazing how, when you take care of the first two steps, God or the universe or grace—whatever you like to call it—tends to step in and support what you’re doing. Things flow to you when you do your part first. We’ve all experienced the phenomenon of serendipity. Something happens that defies explanation, so we call it a coincidence. We miss a train and meet the person we end up marrying. We fill in for a friend, and it leads us to the job of our dreams. We didn’t figure it out in advance, didn’t earn it—it just happened. To me, that’s grace. And the more you acknowledge and appreciate the grace that’s already in your life, the more you experience the gifts that are beyond what you’ve created.

Yes. Let’s be honest. I’m a privileged white woman who left her kids in a $30,000 minivan watching Dora the Explorer to go in for a Starbucks. Is there any clearer picture of privilege than that? But no matter what color you are, no matter how much money you have, you don’t deserve to be harassed for making a rational parenting choice.” It’s funny, but in all the time that had passed, I had never thought about what was happening in quite those terms—as harassment. When a person intimidates, insults, verbally abuses, or demeans a woman on the street, in the bedroom, at the office, in the classroom, it’s harassment. When a woman is intimidated or insulted or abused because of the way she dresses or her sexual habits or her outspokenness on social media, she is experiencing harassment. But when a mother is intimidated, insulted, abused, or demeaned because of the way she is mothering, we call it concern or, at worst, nosiness. A mother, apparently, cannot be harassed. A mother can only be corrected.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the entropy written in our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers [sic] races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

I mean exactly that,” Mr. Davison retorted. “You’ve hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position”—he turned to Kay—“have ‘privilege.’ That’s what I read in the Nation and the New Republic.” Mrs. Davison nodded. “Good,” said Mr. Davison. “Now listen. The fellow who’s got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.

But other people’s money has a narcotic quality. It makes you high. It makes you forget your misgivings. You feel privileged, somehow exceptional to have been invited, as though the tiniest fleck of gold leaf from a giant glittering statue has smudged off on you and you can kid yourself you belong. That you are, for a single night, indubitably One of Them.

That’s why counterfeiting money has always been considered a much more serious crime than other acts of deception. Counterfeiting is not just cheating – it’s a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king. The legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by torture and death.

Purchase Price $250,000 Down Payment $ 25,000 Mortgage Amount $225,000 At 7% Interest Rate 30 Years $1,349 $485,636 15 Years $1,899 $341,762 Difference $550 $143,874 Five hundred fifty dollars more per month, and you will save almost $150,000 and fifteen years of bondage. The really interesting thing I have observed is that fifteen-year mortgages always pay off in fifteen years. Again, part of a Total Money Makeover is putting in place systems that automate smart moves, which is what a fifteen-year mortgage is. Thirty-year mortgages are for people who enjoy slavery so much they want to extend it for fifteen more years and pay thousands of dollars more for the privilege. If you must take out a mortgage, pretend only fifteen-year mortgages exist. If you have a great interest rate, it is not necessary to refinance to pay a mortgage off in fifteen years or earlier. Simply make payments as if you have a fifteen-year mortgage, and your mortgage will pay off in fifteen years. If you want to pay any mortgage off in twelve years or any number you want, visit my website or get a calculator and calculate the proper payment at your interest rate on your balance for a twelve-year mortgage (or the number you want). Once you have that payment amount, add to your monthly mortgage payment the difference between the new principal and interest payment and your current principal and interest payment, and you will pay off your home in twelve years.

I will say this about the upper echelon in France: they know how to spend money. From what I saw living in America, wealth is dedicated to elevating the individual experience. If you’re a well-off child, you get a car, or a horse. You go to summer camps that cost as much as college. And everything is monogrammed, personalized, and stamped, to make it that much easier for other people to recognize your net worth. …The French bourgeois don’t pine for yachts or garages with multiple cars. They don’t build homes with bowling alleys or spend their weekends trying to meet the quarterly food and beverage limit at their country clubs: they put their savings into a vacation home that all their family can enjoy, and usually it’s in France. They buy nice food, they serve nice wine, and they wear the same cashmere sweaters over and over for years. I think the wealthy French feel comfortable with their money because they do not fear it. It’s the fearful who put money into houses with even bedrooms and fifteen baths. It’s the fearful who drive around in yellow Hummers during high-gas-price months becasue if they’re going to lose their money tomorrow, at least other people will know that they are rich today. The French, as with almost all things, privilege privacy and subtlety and they don’t feel comfortable with excess. This is why one of their favorite admonishments is tu t’es laisse aller. You’ve lost control of yourself. You’ve let yourself go.

Women (...) have been encouraged since they were children to be dependent to an unhealthy degree. Any woman who looks within knows that she was never trained to be comfortable with the idea of taking care of herself, standing up for herself, asserting herself. At best she may have played the game of independence, inwardly envying the boys (and later the men) because they seemed so naturally self-sufficient. It is not nature that bestows this self-sufficiency on men; it's training. Males are educated for independence from the day they are born. Just as systematically, women are taught that they have an out - that someday, in some way, they are going to be saved. That is the fairy tale, the life-message (...) We may venture out on our own for a while. We may go away to school, work, travel; we may even make good money, but underneath it all there is a finite quality to our feelings about independence. Only hang on long enough, the childhood story goes, and someday someone will come along to rescue you from the anxiety of authentic living. (The only savior the boy learns about is himself.)

The total average cost of driving, including depreciation, maintenance, and insurance, runs about 61 cents a mile, and since the average automobile used for commuting to work contains only 1.1 people, every commute costs a little more than 55 cents per passenger mile. This means that, if you’re an automobile commuter traveling twenty-five miles each way to work, you’re spending around $30 a day for the privilege, not including the cost, if there is one, to park. You’re also spending an hour every day for which, unless you’re a cabbie or bus driver yourself, you’re not getting paid, and during which you’re not doing anything productive at all. For the average American, that’s another $24. In transportation, time really is money.

Not far under the surface of these stories lie some of the most important themes of later Roman history, as well as some of the deepest Roman cultural anxieties. They have a lot to tell us about Roman values and preoccupations, or at least about the preoccupations of those Romans with time, money and freedom to spare; cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich.

Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education, and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

No amount of money can buy you a career in the RAF. You are judged purely on your ability, your courage, and your appetite for facing danger. I loved my family and respected and admired the traditions and benefits of our privilege, but I was determined to make my own way in life. It was probably this that drove my ambition, that made me push myself harder than most people.

Four thousand two hundred and twenty pounds over thirty-one days was a hundred and thirty-six pounds a night. If the money mattered—if it had ever mattered—he was paying a hundred and thirty-six pounds for the privilege of sitting in an armchair that badly required reupholstering and stroking Robin’s hair, and it was worth every penny because he was here when he was needed.

The Cornelia in limbo,” Marcella said aloud. Not a privileged wife like Lollia, not a pampered daughter like Diana, not even a weeping widow like Cornelia—just an unwanted wife living on her brother’s charity. Of course, things would be different if she were as beautiful as Diana, or as rich as Lollia, or as grief-stricken as Cornelia—money and beauty and unhappiness bought exceptions to anything.

The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have. From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.

In 1970, Alix Kates Shulman, a wife, mother, and writer who had joined the Women's Liberation Movement in New York, wrote a poignant account of how the initial equality and companionship of her marriage had deteriorated once she had children. "[N]ow I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband's life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had." His job became even more demanding, requiring late nights and travel out of town. Meanwhile it was virtually impossible for her to work at home. "I had no time for myself; the children were always there." Neither she nor her husband was happy with the situation, so they did something radical, which received considerable media coverage: they wrote up a marriage agreement... In it they asserted that "each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values and choices... The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside." The agreement insisted that domestic jobs be shared fifty-fifty and, get this girls, "If one party works overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal work by the other." The agreement then listed a complete job breakdown... in other worde, the agreement acknowledged the physical and the emotional/mental work involved in parenting and valued both. At the end of the article, Shulman noted how much happier she and her husband were as a result of the agreement. In the two years after its inception, Shulman wrote three children's books, a biography and a novel. But listen, too, to what it meant to her husband, who was now actually seeing his children every day. After the agreement had been in effect for four months, "our daughter said one day to my husband, 'You know, Daddy, I used to love Mommy more than you, but now I love you both the same.

How she could be both so unyielding and so soft, and he felt it was a privilege to be the one to see that softness. How she expected more of him, just as his best commanding officers had, and how she made him yearn to meet those expectations, be that better man. How she challenged him and forced him to see that his money and his power didn’t have to weigh him down, but could free him. And how she made him feel. Not alone.

In Antwerp, the more tongues you could master, the more you could succeed. If he lacked a phrase in one language, he had it in another, and his earnest vehemence made up for any gaps. He sought out, as he had in Italy, the company of sober elders, whose table talk was refined and who would give away their wisdom to a young foreigner who admired them, one who asks questions, questions, and looks impressed by the replies. Such dignitaries always need a repository for their secrets, just as they need a man who will take a confidential dispatch and be back with an answer before you notice he’s gone. The drawback is that one must consent to their indoor lives: no calcio, just polite archery on a Sunday. The courtyards where one trades in wool and money may be open to the sky, yet they cannot help but smell of tallow, ink and dinners, seeped into the wool of dark winter garments: he would walk, and under the shadow of the Steen with its warehouses take a breath of river air, and imagine the great world beyond. There were some hundred of his countrymen – Englishmen, that is – dwelling in or around their English House; they lived side by side with the Castilian nation, the Portuguese and the Germans, but they were cherished by the city because they paid so well for their privileges.

Baba made it clear that earning and spending money should not be considered an obstacle to the spiritual aspirant. What matters is the attitude with which the money is used. Money becomes a curse to those who want to make it simply to satisfy their own material desires. This brings bondage. A true seeker wants to cultivate the spirit of selflessness and a compassionate heart and shares with the less privileged children of the Divine.

But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided. If Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral insouciance with Sheban elegance.

History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

...I have a theory about why and how all this has happened to you. Instead of having to earn it, you have been handed the presidency, the same way you've come by everything else in your life. Money and name alone have opened every door for you. Without effort or hard work or intelligence, or ingenuity, you have been bequeathed a life of privilege...So it's no wonder you think you deserved to be named President. You didn't earn it or win it- therefore it must be yours!

1)    The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3)    He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4)    He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7)    He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14)   He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17)   He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20)   He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21)   He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22)   He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23)   He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24)   He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25)   He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26)   He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27)   Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28)   He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29)   He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30)   His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Working at Starbucks was an eye-opening experience, and not always in a good way. Our location was next to a private high school, and every afternoon we’d be subject to a steady stream of privileged teenagers messing around with their iPhones as they paid for their vanilla bean Frappuccinos with Starbucks cards. A thought I had not infrequently was I’m (basically) a college graduate working forty hours a week serving milkshakes to teens who have more money in their bank accounts than I do.

Everyone is a troll now. If you’ve ever liked or shared a meme that wished violence on someone you’d never met, if you’ve ever decided it was okay to snarl and snark with venom because the target was “powerful,” if you’ve ever tried to signal your virtue by piling on in an outrage mob, if you’ve ever wrung your hands and expressed concern that perhaps the money raised for some victim should have gone to some other less “privileged” victim—then I hate to break it to you, you’ve also been trolling.

The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it before assets have increased in cost. By the time it reaches ordinary people, the money is worth less. This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect – after Richard Cantillon, who noticed that the creation of paper money in the South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first. Frisby argues that the process of money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. ‘This is not the free market at work, but a gross, unintended economic distortion caused by the colossal government intervention.’ The

The shape and size of the mark varied tremendously throughout history, but the message was always the same: ‘I, the Great King So-And-So, give you my personal word that this metal disc contains exactly 0.2 ounces of gold. If anyone dares counterfeit this coin, it means he is fabricating my own signature, which would be a blot on my reputation. I will punish such a crime with the utmost severity.’ That’s why counterfeiting money has always been considered a much more serious crime than other acts of deception. Counterfeiting is not just cheating – it’s a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king. The legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by torture and death. As long as people trusted the power and integrity of the king, they trusted his coins. Total strangers could easily agree on the worth of a Roman denarius coin, because they trusted the power and integrity of the Roman emperor, whose name and picture adorned it.

And yet I loved this country, its color, its music, its warm friendships, its handsome cities so much older than those in the United States. I have often thought as I watched my wealthy friends enjoy their privileges that there was no country on earth where a young man of good family whose father had a government job from which he could steal a large amount of money could live better. Of course, he would have to blind himself to the gnawing poverty about him, but apparently that was easy, since so many did it.

There are plenty of hustles. Aside from welfare, there are various benefits, disability money, accumulated student aid, subsidies drawn off fictitious childbirths, all kinds of trafficking, and so many other means that arise with every mutation of control. It's not for us to defend them, or to install ourselves in these temporary shelters or to preserve them as a privilege for those in the know. The important thing is to cultivate and spread this necessary disposition towards fraud, and to share its innovations.

How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very blessings of civilisation. What is you excuse? it is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time. There is truth in what you say—I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1886; that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by the law to possess her own property; and that in 1919—which is a whole nine years ago—she was given a vote? May I also remind you that most of the professions have been open to you for close to ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover, the economists are telling us that Mrs. Seton has had too many children. You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves. Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains—you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated—surely you should embark upon another stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have. My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger’s shout that we are now “at war” with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by “an act of war.” Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But the mean-spirited Washington Post pointed out that under U.S. case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an “act of war.” Good try, G.W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own.

You and I the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the "natural" order of things? Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Estimates suggest that $7.6 trillion of wealth is hidden in tax havens all over the world. The international finance sector acts as a 'circulation system for criminal money acquired through drug trafficking, terrorism, piracy, human trafficking, proliferation and tax evasion.' When we look at the international financial system, we don't find a free-market paradise. Instead, we find incredibly powerful institutions in both the public and private sector shaping the conditions faced by everyone else. Financial institutions 'dress themselves up in liberal trappings of the market, yet capture the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed their own profits.' Yet all this power is held without any democratic accountability. Politicians, technocrats, and financiers work together to decide everything from the interest rates we pay on our loans to who gets what when a state files for bankruptcy. If everyone had a say in determining how these rules were made and enforced, rather than just a privileged few, we'd live in a very different world.

...but first the period of human isolation must conclude.' 'What isolation?' I asked him. 'That which is now reigning everywhere, especially in our age, but it is not all concluded yet, its term has not come. For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from himself. He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people's help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and his acquired privileges perish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man's true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity. But there must needs come a term to this horrible isolation, and everyone will at once realize how unnaturally they have separated themselves one from another. Such will be the spirit of the time, and they will be astonished that they sat in darkness for so long, and did not see the light...

There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth--hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic--he came from money, and couldn't see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating.

You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

We also know how dangerous it is to simplify society by the use of examples in nature. However, many Americans still value the honey bee as a symbol of thrift and industry. This value seems to be one of the lingering philosophies from seventeenth-century England, in which the royal authorities and clergy dictated that the lower classes and unemployed should be “busy as bees” so they would not rebel. When the English began to label their own members of society as “drones,” they privileged a new set of values based on work, thrift, and efficiency. The American Dream still seems to be based on these very values. And if somehow people do not attain the American Dream, we tend to think that they have not worked hard enough or did not save their money—in short, they are too much like drones. It could be argued that many American social policies—so conscious of work, labor, and time—are still based on the beehive model first adopted during the seventeenth century in England. For all its rhetoric of new opportunities, America still sees poverty as a sin, as if somehow the poor aren’t thrifty or busy as bees.

A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves that we would prefer to keep private. If someone asks how much money you have in your bank account, you are under no ethical obligation to tell him. The truth could well be “I’d rather not say.” So there is no conflict, in principle, between honesty and the keeping of secrets. However, it is worth noting that many secrets—especially those we are asked to keep for others—can put us in a position where we will be forced to choose between lying and revealing privileged information.

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day by day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions and pensions. This new oligarchic class is creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China: denied rights, their wages dictated to them by the state, and forbidden from organizing or striking. America once attempted to pull workers abroad up to American levels, to foster the building of foreign labor unions, to challenge the abuse of workers in factories that flood the American market with cheap goods. But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity or left to churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized. The

The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due - that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege - many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: 'Money: something everybody else has and I must get,' would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand - two soft, green ten-dollar bills - and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.

History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes. That is because no one policy maker owns the whole cycle. Each comes in at one or another part of it and does what is in their interest to do given their circumstances at the time and what they believe is best (including breaking promises, even though the way they collectively handle the whole cycle is bad).

It will change everything. We won't need governments and corporations. The very concepts our economic and social systems are based on: money, wealth, privilege, will be meaningless. What use is money when everyone can build everything they need?'... 'These are people who've spent their whole lives fighting their way to the top and you're just going to tell them that there is no top anymore?... it's you that doesn't understand: they only care about material things as status symbols, to show that they're better than everyone else, that they've beaten everyone else, that's what drives them. They'll never give that up.

An Act for establishing religious Freedom. Section 1 Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time; That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical; That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right, That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it; That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

It was because of people like him that we’d had to leave in the first place, abandoning our education, our almost-white, brown, and high-yellow privilege, and spend all of our money on visas and plane tickets and American clothes, and now we were nothing. The next day we’d go back to our real lives in New York, Miami, Toronto, London. We blamed the yard boy for that too. Over foreign, we were the Bernards—we were the underclass; we were home health aides, janitors, and nannies. We would think of him and spit the next time we helped elderly women wipe themselves over toilets. We would think that it was all his fault. If people like him would have stayed in their place, then we could have stayed too.

There is nothing inherently evil in the process of making money, and the notion is illogical, but that is one of the underlying tenets in our present education system. We are taught from an early age that making money is hard and that those who make lots of money are morally suspect. American culture studies programs at some of the nation’s leading universities have even gone so far as to teach the absurd and illogical notion that the rich became rich because they enjoy privilege earned on the backs of African slaves. Minority millionaires like entrepreneur Herman Cain, Earl Graves, Sr., and Reginald F. Lewis prove the utter nonsense of this notion, yet this is the illogical Progressive philosophy that has permeated our education system.

And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people's help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and his acquired privileges perish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man's true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity. But there must needs come a term to this horrible isolation, and everyone will all at once realize how unnaturally they have separated themselves from one another.

He knew how to work a crowd and how to package himself as a celebrity. It didn’t matter what the press said about him, he told an associate. “The main thing is that they mention us.” Now let us contemplate one simple but remarkable fact: the Nazis charged entrance fees to Hitler’s speeches! Is there any other politician of the twentieth century who would be considered worth spending money to hear? Churchill at his best, perhaps, though not on so regular a basis as Hitler or with his frequency. Churchill wasn’t the polished performer that Hitler was—just think of the difference in their body language. And before Donald Trump, perhaps, it’s impossible to imagine any modern American candidate for office asking people to pay for the privilege of listening to him try to win their political support.

Now and then, in private, affluent suburbanites concede that certain aspects of the game may be a trifle rigged to their advantage. “Sure, it’s a bit unjust,” they may concede, “but that’s reality and that’s the way the game is played.… “In any case,” they sometimes add in a refrain that we have heard now many times, “there’s no real evidence that spending money makes much difference in the outcome of a child’s education. We have it. So we spend it. But it’s probably a secondary matter. Other factors—family and background—seem to be a great deal more important.” In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing introspection; and this, in turn, enables them to give their children something far more precious than the simple gift of pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction in their victories.

He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual decision to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

I’m not what you think I am, Aladdin! I will betray you, and I will hurt you, because that is what I am. Why do you think Nardukha rips souls from the living and creates jinnis? Why do you think he sends us into the world? To make your miserable dreams come true? To bring you happiness?” I laugh sourly. “He gives you the thing you want most and uses it to destroy you. Look at yourself. You’re a prince. You have money, power, privilege. The chance to avenge your parents. And you’re miserable.” Aladdin stares at me, and in his eyes is pity. “I’ve been making myself miserable my whole life,” he says softly. “I convinced myself long ago that if I could get revenge on Sulifer, I could finally move on. That I could erase the memory of the day my parents died, when I held their severed heads and watched their blood run in the gutters. But as you say, here I am, a step away from that vengeance—and it has soured on my tongue. I don’t want it anymore.” He sighs and looks up at the sky, as if searching for words among the stars. “You don’t make me miserable, Zahra. I do that to myself, because I’m too weak, too afraid to admit that it isn’t Sulifer I’m angry at—it’s me. My parents were killed because of me. The day before they were executed, I was caught by the guards for stealing an earring, and when they found out who I was, Sulifer had me whipped until I told him where my parents were. And after they were dead, he gave me back the earring as payment for turning my mother and father over to him.” Lowering his gaze to meet mine, he brushes his fingers over the ring in his ear. “I’ve worn it every day since, to remind myself that nothing—nothing—is worth betraying someone you love.

One must act radically. When one pulls out a tooth, one does it with a single tug, and the pain quickly goes away. The Jew must clear out of Europe. Otherwise no understanding will be possible between Europeans. It's the Jew who prevents everything. When I think about it, I realise that I'm extraordinarily humane. At the time of the rule of the Popes, the Jews were mistreated in Rome. Until 1830, eight Jews mounted on donkeys were led once a year through the streets of Rome. For my part, I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. If they break their pipes on the journey, I can't do anything about it. But if they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution but extermination. Why should I look at a Jew through other eyes than if he were a Russian prisoner-of-war? In the p.o.w. camps, many are dying. It's not my fault. I didn't want either the war or the p.o.w. camps. Why did the Jew provoke this war? A good three hundred or four hundred years will go by before the Jews set foot again in Europe. They'll return first of all as commercial travellers, then gradually they'll become emboldened to settle here—the better to exploit us. In the next stage, they become philanthropists, they endow foundations. When a Jew does that, the thing is particularly noticed—for it's known that they're dirty dogs. As a rule, it's the most rascally of them who do that sort of thing. And then you'll hear these poor Aryan boobies telling you : "You see, there are good Jews !" Let's suppose that one day National Socialism will undergo a change, and become used by a caste of privileged persons who exploit the people and cultivate money. One must hope that in that case a new reformer will arise and clean up the stables.

Oh don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not after your money. I’ve never cared much for that. No, what I’m after are men. Manpower. Power. Freedom. The chance to win.” He sighed and looked around him with distaste. “You could have been living with me. You could have had it all. Instead you’re in a shithole in America. Do you know where I am now? I have the most beautiful house you could ever imagine, with views as far as the eye can see. I have privilege now. More than that, I have… prestige. What Violetta said about me having a cartel nobody cares about? Oh, I wish she could see me now. I took over for Travis. And more than that, I took over from the Morales. I am at the top. Where I always should have been.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked me dead in the eye, face completely serious. “Where you should have been. Angel. Where the fuck did we go wrong?

At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.

Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Finally, the inner accessibility and reflectiveness of theoretical knowledge which cannot basically be withheld from anybody, as can certain emotions and volitions, has a consequence that directly offsets its practical results. In the first place, it is precisely because of their general accessibility that factors quite independent of personal capacities decide on the factual utilization of knowledge. This leads to the enormous preponderance of the most unintelligent 'educated' person over the cleverest proletarian. The apparent equality with which educational materials are available to everyone interested in them is, in reality, a sheer mockery. The same is true of the other freedoms accorded by the liberal doctrines which, though they certainly do not hamper the individual from gaining goods of any kind, do however disregard the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them. For just as the substance of education - in spite of, or because of it general availability - can ultimately be acquired only through individual activity, so it gives rise to the most intangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinction between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socioeconomic differences) by a decree or a revolution. Thus it was appropriate for Jesus to say to the rich youth: 'Give away your goods to the poor', but not for him to say: 'Give your education to the underprivileged'. There is no advantage that appears to those in inferior positions to be so despised, and before which they feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education. For this reason, attempts to achieve practical equality very often and in so many variations scorn intellectual education. This is true of Buddha, the Cynics, certain currents in Christianity, down to Robespierre's 'nous n'avons pas besoin de savants'. In speech and writing - which, viewed abstractly, are a manifestation of its communal nature - makes possible its accumulation, and, especially, its concentration so that, in this respect, the gulf between high and low is persistently widened. The intellectually gifted or the materially independent person will have all the more chances for standing out from the masses the larger and more concentrated are the available educational materials. Just as the proletarian today has many comforts and cultural enjoyments that were formerly denied to him, while at the same time - particularly if we look back over several centuries and millennia - the gulf between his way of life and that of the higher strata has certainly become much deeper, so, similarly, the rise in the general level of knowledge as a whole does not by any means bring about a general levelling, but rather its opposite.

One cannot erase from a human being’s soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith — for their “god” — as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race.

One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest. In King City, Dr. Tilson felt him over. The doctor grew more testy with his overworked years. "You sprained your back." "That I did," said Samuel. "And you drove all the way in to have me tell you that you sprained your back and charge you two dollars?" "Here's your two dollars." "And you want to know what to do about it?" "Sure I do." "Don't sprain it any more. Now tak your money back. You're not a fool, Samuel, unless you're getting childish." "But it hurts." "Of course it hurts. How would you know it was strained if it didn't?" Samuel laughed. "You're good for me," he said. "You're more than two dollars good for me. Keep the money." The doctor looked closely at him. "I think you're telling the truth, Samuel. I'll keep the money.

In addition to bearing him thirteen children, Soya was privileged to copy the 1,225-page War and Peace by hand eight times while Tolstoy was editing it, because Tolstoy needed clean drafts to send along to the publisher. She also helped him work on the less famous but equally essential book Resurrection about the many women he cheated on with her. In the final weeks of his life, the increasingly radical Tolstoy left his wife without telling her, refused to see her when she tracked him down, and then died ij a train station. But at least Soya was comforted by the fact Tolstoy also made sure that they never had any money. At this point he had already freed his serfs, renounced his title, and given away most of his wealth to the poor. Instead of his wife and kids, he left the entirety of his estate and future royalties to the fringe Doukhobor spiritual movement. Tolstoy was selected for the first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, but he turned it down because he knew the prize money would complicate things in his life, What could a man with a wife and about a dozen children possibly need money for?

This puts me in mind of a circumstance that occurred when I was laboring on a mission in London many, many years ago: We had an old gentleman there that had been in the army. He was a war veteran and he was preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ on the streets. A man came up and slapped him on the face. "Now," he says, "if you are a Christian turn the other cheek." So old daddy turned the other cheek, but he said: "Hit again and down you go." He would have gone down, too, if he had struck again. True, Jesus Christ taught that non-resistance, was right and praiseworthy and a duty under certain circumstances and conditions; but just look at him when he went into the temple, when he made that scourge of thongs, when he turned out the money-changers and kicked over their tables and told them to get out of the house of the Lord! "My house is a house of prayer," he said, "but ye have made it a den of thieves." Get out of here! Hear him crying, "Woe unto you Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and then ye make him ten-fold more the child of hell than he was before." That was the other side of the spirit of Jesus. Jesus was no milksop. He was not to be trampled under foot. He was ready to submit when the time came for his martyrdom, and he was to be nailed on the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, but he was ready at any time to stand up for his rights like a man. He is not only called "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world," but also "the Lion of the Tribe of Judah," and He will be seen to be terrible by and by to his enemies. Now while we are not particularly required to pattern after the "lion" side of his character unless it becomes necessary, the Lord does not expect us to submit to be trodden under foot by our enemies and never resist. The Lord does not want us to inculcate the spirit of war nor the spirit of bloodshed. In fact he has commanded us not to shed blood, but there are times and seasons, as we can find in the history of the world, in [the] Bible and the Book of Mormon, when it is justifiable and right and proper and the duty of men to go forth in the defense of their homes and their families and maintain their privileges and rights by force of arms.

Or again, supposing prizes were offered to the magistrates in charge of the market for equitable and speedy settlements of points in dispute to enable any one so wishing to proceed on his voyage without hindrance, the result would be that far more traders would trade with us and with greater satisfaction. It would indeed be a good and noble institution to pay special marks of honour, such as the privilege of the front seat, to merchants and shipowners, and on occasion to invite to hospitable entertainment those who, through something notable in the quality of ship or merchandise, may claim to have done the state a service. The recipients of these honours will rush into our arms as friends, not only under the incentive of gain, but of distinction also. Now the greater the number of people attracted to Athens either as visitors or as residents, clearly the greater the development of imports and exports. More goods will be sent out of the country, there will be more buying and selling, with a consequent influx of money in the shape of rents to individuals and dues and customs to the state exchequer. And to secure this augmentation of the revenues, mind you, not the outlay of one single penny; nothing needed beyond one or two philanthropic measures and certain details of supervision.

Despite her grave concern over her uncle, Elizabeth chuckled inwardly as she introduced Duncan. Everyone exhibited the same stunned reaction she had when she’d discovered Ian Thornton’s uncle was a cleric. Her uncle gaped, Alex stared, and the dowager duchess glowered at Ian in disbelief as Duncan politely bent over her hand. “Am I to understand, Kensington,” she demanded of Ian, “that you are related to a man of the cloth?” Ian’s reply was a mocking bow and a sardonic lift of his brows, but Duncan, who was desperate to put a light face on things, tried ineffectually to joke about it. “The news always has a peculiar effect on people,” he told her. “One needn’t think too hard to discover why,” she replied gruffly. Ian opened his mouth to give the outrageous harridan a richly deserved setdown, but Julius Cameron’s presence was worrying him; a moment later it was infuriating him as the man strode to the center of the room and said in a bluff voice, “Now that we’re all together, there’s no reason to dissemble. Bentner, being champagne. Elizabeth, congratulations. I trust you’ll conduct yourself properly as a wife and not spend the man out of what money he has left.” In the deafening silence no one moved, except it seemed to Elizabeth that the entire room was beginning to move. “What?” she breathed finally. “You’re betrothed.” Anger rose up like flames licking inside her, spreading up her limbs. “Really?” she said in a voice of deadly calm, thinking of Sir Francis and John Marchman. “To whom?” To her disbelief, Uncle Julius turned expectantly to Ian, who was looking at him with murder in his eyes. “To me,” he clipped, his icy gaze still on her uncle. “It’s final,” Julius warned her, and then, because he assumed she’d be as pleased as he to discover she had monetary value, he added, “He paid a fortune for the privilege. I didn’t have to give him a shilling.” Elizabeth, who had no idea the two men had ever met before, looked at Ian in wild confusion and mounting anger. “What does he mean?” she demanded in a strangled whisper. “He means,” Ian began tautly, unable to believe all his romantic plans were being demolished, “we are betrothed. The papers have been signed.” “Why, you-you arrogant, overbearing”-She choked back the tears that were cutting off her voice-“you couldn’t even be bothered to ask me?” Dragging his gaze from his prey with an effort, Ian turned to Elizabeth, and his heart wrenched at the way she was looking at him. “Why don’t we go somewhere private where we can discuss this?” he said gently, walking forward and taking her elbow. She twisted free, scorched by his touch. “Oh, no!” she exploded, her body shaking with wrath. “Why guard my sensibilities now? You’ve made a laughingstock of me since the day I set eyes on you. Why stop now?

In both cultures, wealth is no longer a means to get by. It becomes directly tied to personal worth. A young suburbanite with every advantage—the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai—still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts. They’re eager to convince us all that Darwinism is at work, when it looks very much to the outside like a combination of gaming a system and dumb luck. In both of these industries, the real world, with all of its messiness, sits apart. The inclination is to replace people with data trails, turning them into more effective shoppers, voters, or workers to optimize some objective. This is easy to do, and to justify, when success comes back as an anonymous score and when the people affected remain every bit as abstract as the numbers dancing across the screen. More and more, I worried about the separation between technical models and real people, and about the moral repercussions of that separation. In fact, I saw the same pattern emerging that I’d witnessed in finance: a false sense of security was leading to widespread use of imperfect models, self-serving definitions of success, and growing feedback loops. Those who objected were regarded as nostalgic Luddites.

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

I believe that if, like me, you have privilege and are equipped with the resources and knowledge to have these conversations, it is your job to educate those who have no idea how to navigate this information, define these resources, and to challenge their own preconceived ideas. It is not solely the responsibility of marginalised people to advocate for their own rights, to explain their own oppression, or to hold hands with the very people undermining them. This is a reminder that each and every one of us has arrived at our current worldview because of people who took the time to explain things, who performed labour to educate us. We need to pay that forward, not sit on high horses. I know I am the product of the people closest to me, and that our debates and occasional conflicts are at the crux of my self-development, reflection, and empowerment. It isn’t your job to engage in harmful conversations with those committed to misunderstanding you but it isn’t helpful to demonise people whose views do not mirror your own or whose progress is slower. It isn’t effective to shut down and to turn your back on those with other worldviews once you believe you know better. We shouldn’t pull the ladder up behind us when we decided we’re in the right place. We shouldn’t be shutting up shop. This is the ultimate opportunity to use what we have learned to ensure marginalised people do not have to have these conversations. We don’t need to speak on behalf of anyone but we can direct people to resources, we can push back on problematic language and views, and we can use our knowledge and privilege for change-making. If you hold the privileges that I do, a White woman claiming to be a feminist, your fear is not enough of a barrier. I know that is a confronting statement but it is something we must interrogate. It is vital to note that there are many circumstances where breaking your silence, challenging the status quo, and speaking out pose a threat. I want to be clear that this is not a call to subject yourself to devastating outcomes, or dangerous conversations, or situations that pose a threat to your safety or security. But if the only thing standing between you and change is fear of causing your friends discomfort, or lowering the mood by calling out something that may be considered taboo, you must walk through that fear. History depends on it. Change is contingent on your voice. If you want to identify as a feminist. If you want to claim this space and that you are #doingthework, this is exactly what that work looks like. Having difficult conversations, being brave, and challenging widely held assumptions. Turning up to the protest. Putting your money toward causes you claim to stand for. Buying the book and using what you’ve learned to ensure this work does not remain the sole responsibility of the impacted, marginalised communities, but becomes something that those without lied experiences understand and advocate for. Doing all this, is more than half the battle. The next time you bookend a conversation with “it is not my job to educate you”, I think it is really important to remember that, actually, it kind of is. Your privilege means you have access to people and influence over them. You are considered by society to be more palatable in your anger, and your advocacy, and people are more willing to hear you speak to difficult topics. It is your job to educate yourself, and to use that inherent privilege to educate others, or to at least have a go. It is your job, as the feminist you claim to be, to act as a barricade for people experiencing compounding marginalisations. It is your job to educate yourself and others. It is as simple as that.

this I say,—we must never forget that all the education a man's head can receive, will not save his soul from hell, unless he knows the truths of the Bible. A man may have prodigious learning, and yet never be saved. He may be master of half the languages spoken round the globe. He may be acquainted with the highest and deepest things in heaven and earth. He may have read books till he is like a walking cyclopædia. He may be familiar with the stars of heaven,—the birds of the air,—the beasts of the earth, and the fishes of the sea. He may be able, like Solomon, to "speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall, of beasts also, and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes." (1 King iv. 33.) He may be able to discourse of all the secrets of fire, air, earth, and water. And yet, if he dies ignorant of Bible truths, he dies a miserable man! Chemistry never silenced a guilty conscience. Mathematics never healed a broken heart. All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death. No natural theology ever gave peace in the prospect of meeting a holy God. All these things are of the earth, earthy, and can never raise a man above the earth's level. They may enable a man to strut and fret his little season here below with a more dignified gait than his fellow-mortals, but they can never give him wings, and enable him to soar towards heaven. He that has the largest share of them, will find at length that without Bible knowledge he has got no lasting possession. Death will make an end of all his attainments, and after death they will do him no good at all. A man may be a very ignorant man, and yet be saved. He may be unable to read a word, or write a letter. He may know nothing of geography beyond the bounds of his own parish, and be utterly unable to say which is nearest to England, Paris or New York. He may know nothing of arithmetic, and not see any difference between a million and a thousand. He may know nothing of history, not even of his own land, and be quite ignorant whether his country owes most to Semiramis, Boadicea, or Queen Elizabeth. He may know nothing of the affairs of his own times, and be incapable of telling you whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the Archbishop of Canterbury is managing the national finances. He may know nothing of science, and its discoveries,—and whether Julius Cæsar won his victories with gunpowder, or the apostles had a printing press, or the sun goes round the earth, may be matters about which he has not an idea. And yet if that very man has heard Bible truth with his ears, and believed it with his heart, he knows enough to save his soul. He will be found at last with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, while his scientific fellow-creature, who has died unconverted, is lost for ever. There is much talk in these days about science and "useful knowledge." But after all a knowledge of the Bible is the one knowledge that is needful and eternally useful. A man may get to heaven without money, learning, health, or friends,—but without Bible knowledge he will never get there at all. A man may have the mightiest of minds, and a memory stored with all that mighty mind can grasp,—and yet, if he does not know the things of the Bible, he will make shipwreck of his soul for ever. Woe! woe! woe to the man who dies in ignorance of the Bible! This is the Book about which I am addressing the readers of these pages to-day. It is no light matter what you do with such a book. It concerns the life of your soul. I summon you,—I charge you to give an honest answer to my question. What are you doing with the Bible? Do you read it? HOW READEST THOU?

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.

I was only ever truly loved once. Everyone has always treated me kindly. Even the most casual acquaintance has found it difficult to be rude or brusque or even cool to me. Sometimes with a little help from me, that kindness could - or at least might - have developed into love or affection. I've had neither the patience nor the concentration of mind to want to make the effort. When I first noticed this in myself - so little do we know ourselves - I attributed it to some shyness of the soul. But then I realised that this wasn't the case, it was an emotional tedium, different from the tedium of life; an impatience with the idea of associating myself with one continuous feeling, especially if that meant steeling myself to make some sustained effort. Why bother thought the unthinking part of me. I have enough subtlety, enough psychological sensitivity to know how, but the why has always escaped me. My weakness of will always began by being a weakness of the will even to have a will. The same happened with my emotions, my intelligence, my will itself, with everything in my life. But on the one occasion that malicious fate caused me to believe I loved someone and to recognise that I really was loved in return , it left me at first stunned and confused as if my number had come up on the lottery and I had won a huge amount of money in some inconvertible currency. Then, because I'm only human, I felt rather flattered. However, that most natural of emotions soon passed, to be overtaken by a feeling difficult to define but one in which tedium, humiliation and weariness predominated. A feeling of tedium as if fate had imposed on me a task to be carried out during some unfamiliar evening shift. As if a new duty - that of an awful reciprocity - were given to me, ironically, as a privilege over which I would have to toil, all the time thanking fate for it. As if the flaccid monotony of life were not enough to bear without superimposing on it the obligatory monotony of a definite feeling.

One cannot erase from a human being's soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith ― their "God" ― as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If we know something about the parents, then we may draw a conclusion about the child: some unpleasant excess or other, some lurking envy, a crude habit of self-justification ―as these three together have at all times made up the essential type of the rabble― something like that must be passed onto the child as surely as corrupt blood, and with the help of the best education and culture people will succeed only in deceiving others about such heredity. And nowadays what else does education and culture want! In our age, one very much of the people - I mean to say our uncouth age ―"education" and "culture" must basically be the art of deception― to mislead about the origin of the inherited rabble in one's body and soul. Today an educator who preached truthfulness above everything else and constantly shouted at his students "Be true! Be natural! Act as you really are!" ― even such a virtuous and true-hearted jackass would after some time learn to take hold of that furca [pitchfork] of Horace, in order to naturam expellere [drive out nature]. With what success? "Rabble" usque recurret [always returns].

Taking control of the situation There are a great many parents—as I’ve learned by attending endless parent support group meetings— who had the same high hopes for their families as I. If you’re such a parent, then you probably know that it isn’t just the child who can be out of control, but also the parent. Possibly you are also aware that continuous reacting on your part is useless as well as extremely hazardous to your health and well-being. The most ruinous thing you can do is to allow the situation to continue on its present destructive course. Here are some simple steps you can take to deactivate the negativity so rampant in your family dynamics. Please note that it takes courage and determination to carry this off successfully. Cut off all funds to the addict. Holding onto the purse strings with an iron fist will have immediate results, as well as repercussions. (Keep an eye on family valuables. In fact, lock them away.) Cut off all privileges accorded to your addicts— such as use of the family car or having their friends in your house. Carry out all threats you make. The fastest way to lose credibility with addicted children is to become a “softie” at the last minute. Refuse to rescue your addicts when they get into legal jams. Don’t pay their fines or their bail. Get yourself into a support group such as Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, Parents Anonymous, or Tough Love as fast as you can. Attempt to get your addicted kids into rehabs. If they’re underage you can sign them in. Adult admission is done on a voluntary basis, so you may be out of luck. Drugs erase any trace of conscience. Be aware that many of today’s drugged youths will think nothing of injuring or even murdering their parents for money. If you suspect that your child could resort to this level of violence, get in touch with the police. If you’re a single parent there will be one voice, but if you’re married there’ll be two. It’s important to merge those two voices so that a single, clear message reaches the addict. If you can work with your partner as a team to institute these simple steps when dealing with the addict, you’ll have done yourself and your family a great service. If, however, you entertain the notion that you were responsible for your child’s addictions in the first place, chances are you won’t be effective in enforcing these guidelines. That’s what the next chapter is all about. Note 1. Drug abuse and alcoholism are officially listed in The International Classification of Diseases, 4th edition, 9th revision, the World Health Organization’s directory on diseases.

Punishment is not care, and poverty is not a crime. We need to create safe, supportive pathways for reentry into the community for all people and especially young people who are left out and act out. Interventions like decriminalizing youthful indiscretions for juvenile offenders and providing foster children and their families with targeted services and support would require significant investment and deliberate collaboration at the community, state, and federal levels, as well as a concerted commitment to dismantling our carceral state. These interventions happen automatically and privately for young offenders who are not poor, whose families can access treatment and hire help, and who have the privilege of living and making mistakes in neighborhoods that are not over-policed. We need to provide, not punish, and to foster belonging and self-sufficiency for our neighbors’ kids. More, funded YMCAs and community centers and summer jobs, for example, would help do this. These kinds of interventions would benefit all the Carloses, Wesleys, Haydens, Franks, and Leons, and would benefit our collective well-being. Only if we consider ourselves bound together can we reimagine our obligation to each other as community. When we consider ourselves bound together in community, the radically civil act of redistributing resources from tables with more to tables with less is not charity, it is responsibility; it is the beginning of reparation. Here is where I tell you that we can change this story, now. If we seek to repair systemic inequalities, we cannot do it with hope and prayers; we have to build beyond the systems and begin not with rehabilitation but prevention. We must reimagine our communities, redistribute our wealth, and give our neighbors access to what they need to live healthy, sustainable lives, too. This means more generous social benefits. This means access to affordable housing, well-resourced public schools, affordable healthcare, jobs, and a higher minimum wage, and, of course, plenty of good food. People ask me what educational policy reform I would suggest investing time and money in, if I had to pick only one. I am tempted to talk about curriculum and literacy, or teacher preparation and salary, to challenge whether police belong in schools, to push back on standardized testing, or maybe debate vocational education and reiterate that educational policy is housing policy and that we cannot consider one without the other. Instead, as a place to start, I say free breakfast and lunch. A singular reform that would benefit all students is the provision of good, free food at school. (Data show that this practice yields positive results; but do we need data to know this?) Imagine what would happen if, across our communities, people had enough to feel fed.

To every one Jesus has left a work to do, there is no one who can plead that he is excused. Every Christian is to be a worker with Christ; but those to whom he has intrusted large means and abilities have the greater responsibilities. … The Master has given directions, “Occupy till I come.” He is the great proprietor, and has a right to investigate every transaction, and approve or condemn; he has a right to rebuke, to encourage, to counsel, or to expel. The Lord’s work requires careful thought and the highest intellect. He will not inquire how successful you have been in gathering means to hoard, or that you may excel your neighbors in property, and gather attention to yourself while excluding God from your hearts and homes. He will inquire, What have you done to advance my cause with the talents I lent you? What have you done for me in the person of the poor, the afflicted, the orphan, and the fatherless? I was sick, poor, hungry, and destitute of clothing; what did you do for me with my intrusted means? How was the time I lent you employed? How did you use your pen, your voice, your money, your influence? I made you the depositary of a precious trust by opening before you the thrilling truths heralding my second coming. What have you done with the light and knowledge I gave you to make men wise unto salvation? Our Lord has gone away to receive his kingdom; but he will prepare mansions for us, and then will come to take us to himself. In his absence he has given us the privilege of being co-laborers with him in the work of preparing souls to enter those mansions of light and glory. It was not that we might lead a life of worldly pleasure and extravagance that he left the royal courts of Heaven, clothing his divinity with humanity, and becoming poor that we through his poverty might be made rich. He did this that we might follow his example of self-denial for others. Each one of us is building upon the true foundation, wood, hay, and stubble, to be consumed in the last great conflagration, and our life-work be lost, or we are building upon that foundation, gold, silver, and precious stones, which will never perish, but shine the brighter amid the devouring elements that will try every man’s work. Any unfaithfulness in spiritual and eternal things here will result in loss throughout endless ages. Those who lead a Christless life, who exclude Jesus from heart, home, and business, who leave him out of their counsels, and trust to their own heart, and rely on their own judgment, are unfaithful servants, and will receive the reward which their works have merited. At his coming the Master will call his servants, and reckon with them. The parable certainly teaches that good works will be rewarded according to the motive that prompted them; that skill and intellect used in the service of God will prove a success, and will be rewarded according to the fidelity of the worker. Those who have had an eye single to the glory of God will have the richest reward. -ST 11-20-84

You do have money, don’t you? You never paid your fare yesterday. It’s six pounds, eight. If you haven’t the coin, I’ll have no choice but to hold you for ransom once we reach Tortola.” Her fare. Sophia sipped her tea with relief. If Mr. Grayson was this concerned over six pounds, he surely had no idea he was harboring a runaway heiress with nearly one hundred times that amount strapped beneath her stays. She suppressed a nervous laugh. “Yes, of course I can pay my passage. You’ll have your money today, Mr. Grayson.” “Gray.” “Mr. Grayson,” she said, her voice and nerves growing thin, “I scarcely think that my moment of…of indisposition gives you leave to make such an intimate request, that I address you by your Christian name. I certainly shall not.” He clucked softly, wrapping the handkerchief around his fingers. With hypnotic tenderness, he reached out, drawing the fabric across her temple. “Now, sweetheart-surely my parents can be credited with greater imagination than you imply. Christening me ‘Gray Grayson’?” He chuckled low in his throat. “Everyone aboard this ship calls me Gray. Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s no particular privilege. There’s but one woman on earth permitted to address me by my Christian name.” “Your mother?” He grinned again. “No.” She blinked. “Oh, now don’t look so disappointed,” he said. “It’s my sister.” Sophia slanted her gaze to her lip, cursing herself for playing into his charm. If the sight of him drove the wits from her skull, the solution was plain. She mustn’t look. But then he pressed the handkerchief into her hand, covering her fingers with his own, and Sophia could not retrieve the small, defeated sigh that fell from her lips. His touch devastated her resolve completely. His hand was like the rest of him. Brute strength, neatly groomed. She heartily wished she’d thought to put on gloves. He leaned closer, his scent intruding through the pervasive smell of seawater-wholly masculine and faintly spicy, like pomade and rum. “And sweetheart, if I did make an intimate request of you”-his thumb swept boldly over the delicate skin of her wrist-“you’d know it.” Sophia sucked in her breath. “So call me Gray.” He released her hand abruptly. Disappointment-unbidden, imprudent, unthinkable emotion-cinched in Sophia’s chest. Distance from this man was precisely what she wished. Well, if not precisely what she wished, it was exactly what she needed. He looked at her as though he’d laid all her secrets bare, and her body as well. She pushed the tankard back at him, leaving him no choice but to take it from her hands. “I shall continue to address you as propriety demands, Mr. Grayson.” She cast him a sharp look. “And you certainly are not at liberty to call me ‘sweetheart.’” He donned an expression of wide-eyed innocence. “That isn’t what it stands for, then?” Teasing the handkerchief from her clenched fist, he ran his thumb over the embroidered monogram. S.H. “You see?” He traced each letter with the pad of his finger. “Sweet. Heart. I thought surely that must be it. Because I know your name is Jane Turner.” His lips curved in that insolent grin. “Unless…don’t tell me. It was a gift?