Katherine Boo Quotes

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

I represent both the underdog and the overdog in our society.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

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

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

Talking about class terrifies me. There is no way of winning.

The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.

This whole segregation between famous people and other people is complete rubbish.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

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

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

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

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

But the truth is the meritocracy is a lie. Those born into wealth and privilege will always be able to game the system for their own benefit and their children's own benefit.

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 firmly believe that talent and intelligence are universal, but resources and opportunities are not.

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.

Meritocracy is a system of segregation.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

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

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

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.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.