Social Stratification Quotes

“Laziness can be a value on its own for those who want to show supremacy through contempt for work and wish to be free individuals by fighting the enslavement to labor. While they don’t want to become dependent on ‘wage slavery’ and their livelihood only hinges on salaries, they feel confined to a social stratification, causing a collective stigma that results in poverty and underfeeding. (The daily job)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I'd seen death at Maiwand. Dying friends and dead Afghans. On the road to Khandahar....and Karachi. Each time is different, but to me the pain was the same. An ache twists inside when a friend's eyes plead, pleading that gives way to realization, that final contortion as the body fights to hold a soul already breaking free, tearing its way out.”
― Nev March, Murder in Old Bombay

“Privilege increases the odds of having things your own way, of being able to set the agenda in a social situation and determine the rules and standards and how they're applied. Privilege grants the cultural authority to make judgments about others and to have those judgments stick. It allows people to define reality and to have prevailing definitions of reality fit their experience. Privilege means being able to decide who gets taken seriously, who receives attention, who is accountable to whom and for what. And it grants a presumption of superiority and social permission to act on that presumption without having to worry about being challenged.”
― Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference

“He [Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1795], coined the term Caucasian on the basis of a favorite skull of his that had come into his possession from the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. To him, the skull was the most beautiful of all that he owned. So he gave the group to which he belonged, the Europeans, the same name as the region that had produced it. That is how people now identified as white got the scientific-sounding yet random name Caucasian.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“That’s the big trouble with our whole school system in this country. The kids are all educated to live a kind of life that they may never have a chance to live. A kid in the slums goes to school and is taught all about how to be President of the United States and he’s told that’s what he should try to be, when the fact is he will be darn lucky if he ever gets to be a truck driver. You know how mixed up our school system is.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals