Birth Privilege Quotes

We remain a country where a young person's chance of fulfilling their potential rests on the vagaries of where they were born and what their parents do, rather than their innate talent and ambition.

Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority.

In global terms, to be born British remains a remarkable stroke of luck.

Isn't it interesting that all of those people who support the choice of abortion have already been born?

We hold the view that all men are created equal." Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of property; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth to both the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggles, the poor are not wrong in believing.

Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.

There are millions of Americans outside Washington who are tired of stale political arguments and are moving this country forward. They believe, and I believe, that here in America, our success should depend not on accident of birth, but the strength of our work ethic and the scope of our dreams.

To say that a single human being, because of his birth, becomes an untouchable, unapproachable or invisible is to deny God.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

Most Americans seem to be stuck in the economic strata to which they were born.

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

a kid should have an equal shot at a good life in our city, regardless of what part of town they happen to be born in.

The Honours List is accused of being too top heavy, rewarding those born with a silver spoon in their mouth - as if hereditary titles and accidents of birth are incompatible with democracy. But if you stop to think about it, what is more democratic than nature?

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

A human born somewhere in this world doesn't have the same chances as another one born in Paris, England, or the U.S. We don't have the same chances at the beginning.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life

A well-born man is fortunate, but so is the man about whom people no longer ask, 'is he well-born?'

But the desire of obtaining the advantages, and of escaping the burthens, of political society, is a perpetual and inexhaustible source of discord; nor can it reasonably be presumed that the restoration of British freedom was exempt from tumult and faction. The pre-eminence of birth and fortune must have been frequently violated by bold and popular citizens; and the haughty nobles, who complained that they were become the subjects of their own servants, would sometimes regret the reign of an arbitrary monarch.

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.