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About this quote

What does it mean?
People often blame luck for favoring unfair people instead of recognizing systemic bias.
In plain terms
Why does bad luck favor the wicked?
What can you take from it?
Look beyond chance to understand inequality.

Where it applies

  • analyzing success
  • social commentary

Putting it to work

  • advocating fairness
  • critiquing systems

Questions to consider

  • Is the world fair?
  • Why do bad things happen to good people?

Another view

It assumes fortune has agency rather than randomness.

More from Henry Clay

  1. If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.

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  2. The gentleman cannot have forgotten his own sentiment, uttered even on the floor of this House, 'Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.'

    Permalink to quote #3
  3. An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

    Permalink to quote #4

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