Nick Harkaway Quotes

I don't hear women who are less privileged thinking they're entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That's a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon.

I have different privileges because I am a man, and I have to acknowledge that and realize that another person of color who is also a woman is having a different experience than I am.

I learned early that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

Like it or not, most things in this country are run by white males.

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

I'm not interested in defending the position of those who already have money, power and privilege.

Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security, and prestige, it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.

In some ways, privileged women who are closer to power wind up being able to exert their influence in ways that change public policy in ways that women with less power don't have access to.

There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.

At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.

There are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

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

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice.

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

Maybe I'm an elitist, but I don't feel like I am.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.

I am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky. And life isn't fair.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.