Unearned Quotes

#1. Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Margaret Atwood

#2. Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#3. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate.

Peggy McIntosh

#4. Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.

William Graham Sumner

#5. unearned suffering is redemptive.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#6. During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on 'unearned income' have bounced up and down with regularity, and I've never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.

Steven Rattner

#7. The desire for self-esteem without integrity is like the desire for wealth without effort-a longing for the unearned.

Nathaniel Branden

#8. Don't be overly concerned about your heirs. Usually, unearned funds do them more harm than good.

Gerald M. Loeb

#9. Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

Ayn Rand

#10. Sure, the job of high school teachers is not to tear down students' self-esteem. But it's certainly not to inflate students' sense of self-worth with a bunch of unearned compliments and half-truths.

LZ Granderson

#11. Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#12. Parents who let teens run around with unearned adult freedoms are naive and stupid.

Dave Ramsey

#13. If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money; either in matter or in spirit.

Ayn Rand

#14. Character determines how we lead our lives, how we deal with life's unearned fortunes and misfortunes and how we make choices that determine how those fortunes and misfortunes work to make us what we become.

Michael Josephson

#15. Since we're all rich with bitcoins ... we ought to put some of this unearned wealth to good use.

Hal Finney

#16. He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.

Jess Walter

#17. True love is the unearned compliment, the gift forever giving ...

Cecil B. Day

#18. Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce are three of my biggest influences, all of them for their formal freedom and their ability to create mood. So those comparisons are immensely flattering and, of course, unearned.

Teju Cole

#19. His position, like so many of his ilk, was one of uncontested and unearned respect.

John Boyne

#20. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.

Ayn Rand

#21. I don't like indecent, unearned wealth. But it is legitimate for an entrepreneur who has created something to make a good living.

Francois Hollande

#22. If you look to the downtrodden and wonder why they can't pull themselves out of poverty and get a nice job like you, you are committing the just-world fallacy. You are ignoring the unearned blessings of your station.

David McRaney

#23. It doesn't promote your life to reduce unearned guilt ... You should get rid of that guilt. It's unearned. You don't deserve it. So when we guilt businessmen into giving, it's not in their self-interest.

Yaron Brook

#24. Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little ... scabs," she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. "I hate this type of - and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase - "unearned unhappiness!

William Styron

#25. Praise without merit is more harmful than unearned criticism.

Roger Ebert

#26. Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace
a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

Edward Abbey

#27. Leave no stone unturned and you will leave no reward unearned.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#28. I always think that the people who have the hardest time in the spotlight are the people who have unearned fame, like the girlfriends of people who are famous or people who become figures of attention, not through their own merit.

Rosamund Pike

#29. People often call fighting discrimination being "PC" because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

DaShanne Stokes

#30. I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned

Patrick Rothfuss

#31. Joaquin was almost ten years older than me, born in Philadelphia, and possessed a swagger that seemed unearned, considering he was wearing a FUCKING FEDORA.

Lena Dunham

#32. Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.

Margot Lee Shetterly

#33. It was about grace, she decides, something that has been missing from her own life ... She wants to be the kind of person who can bestow unearned kindness on another, replace bitterness with empathy, forgive only for the sake of forgiving.

Emily Giffin

#34. Enron would keep its unearned windfall, generated solely because David Duncan didn't know what he was doing.

Kurt Eichenwald

#35. In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

Ridley Scott

#36. I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.

Seth Godin

#37. Furthermore, the unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of a new State.

William Graham Sumner

#38. Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Ayn Rand

#39. A bunch of unearned trophies around the house would make me hooked on awards, which is bad in general, but especially bad if you don't deserve them. The whole experience made me want to win another trophy, but win it for actually doing something great.

Mindy Kaling

#40. He also carried that whiff of unearned arrogance that seems to cling to those who crave authority for the sheer sake of power.

Blake Crouch

#41. Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.

J. Edgar Hoover

#42. "You're a sex icon." Why? Because I played a vampire in a movie? It's all very unearned. If I had the best freaking abs in the world or if I looked like Brad Pitt does in Fight Club, then cool, but I'm not starving myself.

Kellan Lutz

#43. It seems to me that the least deserving recipients of wealth are inheritors. Further, there are many indications that inheritors often have trouble adjusting to their unearned inheritance. An inheritance tax would de facto help remedy this.

Julian Robertson

#44. One question for me and others like me is whether ... we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and, if so, what we will do to lessen them.

Peggy McIntosh

#45. Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good ...

June Jordan

#46. I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value.

Ayn Rand

#47. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it. The

Margaret Atwood

#48. Every talent is unearned, however, and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and as wisely as possible.

Dean Koontz

#49. The natural consequences of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands.

Ariel Allison

#50. The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

Ayn Rand

#51. The dilemma of modern society: the conflict between the need for capital formation at a high rate and the popular condemnation of interest and dividends as "unearned income" and "capitalist," if not as sinful and wicked.

Peter Drucker

#52. Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it?

Mark Twain

#53. Paul presents the Good News: Salvation is available to all, regardless of a person's identity, sin, or heritage. We are saved by grace (unearned, undeserved favor from God) through faith (complete trust) in Christ and his finished work. Through him we can stand before God justified, not guilty

Anonymous

#54. One of the noblest words in our language is "grace," defined as "unearned blessing." We live by grace far more than by anything else. Accordingly, I find that the one thing which I want to put into practice in my own life is the conscious and deliberate habit of finding someone to thank.

D. Elton Trueblood

#55. If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

Ayn Rand

#56. I hate this type of unearned unhappiness.

William Styron

#57. White privilege is the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.

Peggy McIntosh

#58. (T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college ... Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.

Jincy Willett

#59. Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.

Aldo Leopold

#60. I get it, you know. I'm operating on privilege too. It may be a number of notches down from yours but it's every bit as unearned. I think the trick is to never forget it.

Sabrina Vourvoulias

#61. Love is holy because it is like grace
the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

Marilynne Robinson