Quiet Street Quotes

“In The Politics, Aristotle observed that citizens “who enjoy too many advantages—strength, wealth, connexions, and so forth—are both unwilling to obey, and ignorant how to obey, the law.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege

“Anand Giridharadas detailed in his book Winners Take All, the reality of this service was often self-enrichment: “All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change…. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege

“deeper lessons were confidence, poise in any context, what sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan calls ease. Old-fashioned exclusionary markers could in fact be a liability, in the same way an all-white classroom was. All the world was ours not because of what we excluded or inherited but because of our open-minded good manners and how hard we worked—which, all agreed, was very hard indeed. This superficial meritocracy masked, especially to ourselves, a profound entitlement.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege