Elif Batuman Quotes

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.

The only living socities are those which are animated by inequality and injustice.

It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

You can't comfort the afflicted with afflicting the comfortable.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

I do think that this planet is a totally unjust planet. I mean throughout history - history paints a beautiful picture when it's written by the victorious, but it's a planet that belongs to the strong and the more able, and usually they are tyrants. So basically, I don't see justice happening to the crushed and the weak.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

We should get rid of 'tick box' measures that do nothing to address underlying inequality in areas like employment. And we should interrogate the claims of victimization made by some organizations to get their slice of pie.

I both love inequality and am terrified of it.

In practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history.

We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.