About Privileges

Notable quotes

“Let us award a just, a brilliant homage to those rare men whom nature has endowed with the precious privilege of arranging a thousand isolated facts, of making seductive theories spring from them; but let us not forget to state, that the scythe of the reaper had cut the stalks before one had thought of uniting them into sheaves!”
— François Arago, Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859), Joseph Fourier, p. 409.
“Tel est le privilége du génie : il aperçoit, il saisit des rapports, là où des yeux vulgaires lie voient que des faits isolés.”
— Such is the privilege of genius; it perceives, it seizes relations where vulgar eyes see only isolated facts.
“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953
“Privilege has always been a dulling factor in one’s comprehension of human difference.”
— Sarah Schulman,
“Men differ in … social status. … Simple observation shows that in every such situation he who is more favored feels the never ceasing need to look upon his position as in some way “legitimate,” upon his advantage as “deserved,” and the other’s disadvantage as being brought about by the latter’s “fault.” That the purely accidental causes of the difference may be ever so obvious makes no difference.”
— Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 953

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.