Tristan Flock Quotes

Moral indignation has a way of obscuring sober reasoning, and those who speak of privilege are often primed (by professors, peers, and media) to actively seek out moral transgressions. As such, many backwards beliefs and harmful attitudes have found a toehold amongst “privileged” millennials, who presume their views to be self-evidently righteous and thus not up for debate. Many of these views, were they to become widespread, would lead to the destruction of the privileges that we in the developed world are so fortunate to enjoy. These include free expression, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, the rule of law, and ongoing efforts to judge people not by their phenotype but rather by their actions.

Sadly, the pernicious ironies of privilege talk are generally lost on those who claim to be most aware of privilege.

Many of the ideas that accompany privilege talk, if implemented, would wreak havoc on human wellbeing. If people truly acknowledged their privilege, they would show a greater concern for the forces behind it, which permit them to lead long, healthy, educated, leisure-filled lives, all the while incessantly complaining about the unadulterated evils of modern civilization.

Many will equate words with violence, claiming that harsh criticism and invective are akin to physical abuse. According to this view, violence may be inflicted upon a person merely by offending them. Anyone who claims to believe this, despite never having experienced actual fist-in-their-face, gun-at-their-back, war-in-their-streets physical violence, may need to check their privilege. … if we tear down the distinction between words and violence, then why not simply use violence to solve our problems as a first rather than a last resort?

Many of the most privilege-conscious see capitalism as an evil economic regime and think of freedom only as a propaganda term thrown about by neoconservatives. To them, capitalism is the bogeyman hiding behind all of our societal ills, and freedom is an ideal used purely to justify global abuse. If someone lives in a country graced by low levels of poverty, legitimate democratic elections, and a press that publicizes the plight of the governed, yet they wish to abolish markets and live in something more akin to a Communist state, they should check their privilege.

Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture.

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

I didn't go into 'Rabbit Hole' wanting to write about class. I think because of who I am it somehow found its way into it.

We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

To call someone “privileged” is to say that his or her successes are undeserved. It’s a personal insult posing as social critique.

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

John Kerry has promised to take this country back from the wealthy. Who better than the guy worth $700 million to take the country back? See, he knows how the wealthy think. He can spy on them at his country club, at his place in Palm Beach, at his house in the Hamptons. He's like a mole for the working man.

There's nothing funny about, 'Yeah, I took a First Class plane ticket and I went to some designer beach and made out with a Laotian slave girl.' Who cares?

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

I think a snob would be a person who thinks he is entitled; he has good things in his life and is entitled to them.

Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

The examined life has always been pretty well confined to a privileged class.

They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs.

But, you see, that's the luxury of being a lout - you get to be selective about when you care and when you don't. The rest of us get stuck when your care goes shallow.

It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

What is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.