privilege quotes

That vast portion†of the working-class which, raw and half-developed has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding- place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes,breaking what it likestothisvast residuum we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.

- Matthew Arnold
  Culture and  Anarchy, ch.3.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope isgone.

-Jane Austen
  Persuasion, ch.23.

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that isthefact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

-W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois
Preface to reprint of  The Souls of Black Folk (1969).

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes
  The Poet at the Breakfast  Table, ch.10.

Humanitydoesnot passthrough phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.

- C(live) S(taples) Lewis
  The Allegory of Love, ch.1.

The discussion of any subject is a right that you have brought into the world with your heart and tongue. Resign your heart's blood before you part with this inestimable privilege of man.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  An Address to the Irish People.

'Before she came,'said a soldier,'there was cussin'and swearin', but after that it was 'oly as a church.' The most cherished privilege of the fighting man was abandoned for the sake of Miss Nightingale.

- (Giles) Lytton Strachey
  EminentVictorians,'Florence Nightingale'.