Alexander Herzen Quotes

The world has grown rich and refined, but chiefly by the efforts of those who themselves continue poor and ignorant.

Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start.

I always put people with my kind of background first.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement.

The idealists dream and the dream is told, and the practical men listen and ponder and bring back the truth and apply it to human life, and progress and growth and higher human ideals come into being and so the world moves ever on.

Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?

Every country has a part that is undeveloped.

Challengers do not have a level playing field.

White men, seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life.

My fear is that in general terms the evolution of the political process proceeds at the same pace as the evolution of the species and I do not myself believe that that is quite fast enough

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

Whenever we have sought real progress through affirmative action, the spokespersons of the advantaged have not hesitated to cry foul ….

The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities, we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires. We add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention. Yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.

The white actresses I have known have been allowed to do 10 times more than I shall ever do.

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works.

I think what we forget is that everybody loses when we keep unnecessary privilege. The cost to society overall is much greater.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.