25 Quotes Tagged: entitlement

Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right — creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them. ...Entitled people, because they are incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way. They are left chasing high after high and accumulate greater and greater levels of denial.

This entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the middle.

Because when you give too many fucks — when you give a fuck about everyone and everything — you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.

Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish.

My last penny! I think I'll squander it on myself. I never feel badly about spending money my dad has earned honestly! I can't decide whether I should buy a balloon or a gumball. A gumball would taste mighty good, but a balloon would be a lot more fun... I'll take a balloon! Sooner or later in life a person has to learn to make decisions! (Sees someone with a different color balloon) Gee, I wish I'd bought a RED balloon.

For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and deservedness. ...Evil people never believe that they are evil, rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

The man afflicted by hunger for power or money for its own sake is just that: afflicted. He is tormented by incessant desires for more without cause. He is the most likely to wear a social mask to succeed, and thus he is always unsure of himself and his life, the deep tear inside always causing him to obsess about how to get more, why he doesn't have it already, and whom he will have to please or become in order to get it.

Charlie Brown: A penny! Rats! Why couldn't I have found a nickel? What good is a penny these days? Why do things like that always happen to me?! *walks off frustrated*
Lucy: Gee, he found a penny! Why don't things like that ever happen to me?

It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn't a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.

All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. Nonstop. Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that's what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That's the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. The deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough. So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction.

You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

If this country is ever demoralized, it will come from trying to live without work.