Tom Stoppard Quotes

But, unfortunately, sometimes that affirmation creates a sense that you deserve special treatment and recognition in areas where you're not so talented.

I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.

I hate being called spoilt. My life is ordinary.

Actors are excused from a lot of things, and we get away with a lot... I find it equally interesting and exciting as it is disgusting and bizarre.

Smart, well-meaning people get it wrong when they start believing that the world owes them something and that the rules are different for them.

The very men to whom the whole country looks to set an example …to accept … the personal inconvenience, are doing exactly the reverse …. They are cackling like wet hens to hold their special privilege.

[The legislature] has no right to give monopolies of legal privilege—to bestow unequal portions of our common inheritance on favorites.

Politicians only get to the top because they have no qualifications to detain them at the bottom.

I stand by it. I take the criticism for it. I think it's unfair, but yes, there is a thing about nepotism, and we all try to respect it.

The worst country I ever lived in, the old U.S.S.R., was crammed with privileges for the political elite. They had their own hospital, their own shops, country houses, and blocks of flats, special lanes on the streets so they could bypass the traffic in their special cars.

People automatically assume that if I get anywhere it's because of my association with X, Y or Z, or because I'm pretty.

Surely, early in my karting career it was tough because many people were jealous and thinking I had special treatment from the stewards and was getting special treatment. But generally I'm just happy to be a Magnussen.

In a supposedly free and equal country, there is no excuse for our rulers having VIP treatment. On the contrary, there is every reason for them to get what we get, hot and strong.

Getting that debut film is definitely harder than someone who has got a known last name. I mean some star kids don't even audition.

George Karl's son probably wouldn't have made it to the NBA if he wasn't a coach. He would have never got the opportunity.

No one needs to treat you like a star kid in the industry, but you do get pointed at... people assume you get everything on a silver platter, but that's not true.

Equal opportunity is good, but special privilege is better.

A little nepotism never hurt nobody, honey. If you got it, use it. Press on with it. Remind them of it.

When you're an actor, you're mollycoddled and you're treated with kid gloves.

Only cream and SOBs rise to the top.

In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted and coddled and given special consideration and special privilege. Of course that can't be done.

You have to feel fortunate to be one of the people whom parents don't mind their children looking up to. The older I get, the more I think about the amount of influence I have on these young girls, and it's scary sometimes. But I also understand how lucky I am to have that.

Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

I hate to see a young man get ahead on the basis of a famous family name.