Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

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.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

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.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

I didn't believe one man should have so much services and another man should have none.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose; while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives.

If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. ... it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.

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.

Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

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

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

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.