Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

I want nothing to do with privilege.

You [a country] cannot be rich, successful and powerful and still be loved, particularly be those who have little success, wealth or power.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

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

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

There's no Peter York Foundation, and you're no one without one.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

Only powerful people have liberty.

Private education can give you confidence, which is marvellous; a sense of entitlement isn't.

The fight is over two fundamentally different ideas about the nature of America. On one side are those who believe that that every hardworking person should be able to rise. On the other are those who believe that wealthy white men should always rule over a permanent class of workers.

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.

I've got all the tools to make it hard for anyone, especially someone that's a division lower than me.

Pessimism is the luxury of the powerful.

... anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be.

the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.

And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

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.

I'm John the Fourth, so I think there's a lot of things in life that have been truly handed to me by the hard work and the pain of others.

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

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

It's true; I'm fascinated by elite groups.

There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.