Anand Giridharadas Quotes

Obviously, I have certain policy positions that I push and advocate for that would benefit people dealing in a system that breeds inequality and makes life more difficult for people.

The First Law of Class Warfare: Once inequalities develop, the upper classes can, with relative ease, drastically reduce the probability of success for any equalizing challenges to the system.

I think that civil rights issues take a lot of time to develop.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal - if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

I'm driven by the gaps, the things that are missing, the areas where marginalized people exist - and where the least resources are available for them.

Only when we recognise our privilege, we will be able to make a change for others.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

I don't think we live in a particularly equal society.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

Do you know what social justice is? Do you know what social reform is? I didn't either, but reform and social justice are what I intend to do.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

It's important for that to exist in a society that doesn't present you with any genuine problems.