A Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin
If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
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It is a privilege to serve people, a privilege that must be earned, and once earned, there is an obligation to do something good with it.
It stirs up envy, fame does. People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you - and it won't hurt your feelings - like it's happening to your clothing.
Some people think that gender equality is the biggest issue on the table, and to me, that's a privilege to even think that that's the biggest issue, because I am subject to much more inequality.
There are different qualities of silence. There's the silence that sustains us, as women, that nourishes us, the silence where I believe our true voice, our authentic voice, dwells. But there's also the silence that censors us, that tells us what we have to say does not want to be heard, should not be heard, has no value. And that if we speak, it will be at our own peril. This kind of silence is deadly. This kind of silence is deadening to who we are as women. And when a woman is silenced, the world is silenced. When a woman speaks, there is an opening.
Now, as I move through my fifties, I can be professional and domestic, creative and intellectual, patient and urgent. I have learned that we should never settle for someone else's definition of who we can be. Growing to this age, I realize, is kind of like feeling your voice deepen. It's still your voice, but it has more substance, and it sounds like it knows its own origins.
So many people are campaigning, fighting, and even dying to make a statement in the name of humanity. These people have no voice that can be heard by many. I wish more celebrities would take the initiative to be that voice.
The more you openly name your struggles, the less people can use your silence as a back door to blackmail you, to sabotage your leadership, or to subvert relationships within the organization.
It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
I very happily stand for the right of every man and woman in Pennsylvania to have their voice heard in elections. And when they do have their voice heard, it's nothing short of a privilege to welcome and respect that voice because this is a democracy, and that's what we do.
If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.
When you have a voice and a platform and you know better, it becomes your moral obligation to support that community. And by extension, you're supporting your family.
When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.
One way of submitting your moral intuitions in relation to some issue to cognitive therapy is to learn more about how people in other cultures think about it.
More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.
It is hard to quantify the value of name recognition, but Donald Trump has gone from fame to international mega-fame. That has to be gargantuan when your business is your name.
As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it's ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.
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