Quotes about elitism

Two principles have stood face-to-face from the beginning of time and they will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.

Rich or poor, money rules with an iron fist.

I Am In Love With Myself, With My Heart.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.

What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed?

They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

It's easy for common people to say what they think about the government. No one listens to them.

If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts.

I wonder why it is that the countries with the most nobles also have the most misery?

The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity's tendency toward "an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.

Morality is what the queen expects from the hive, not from herself.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.

Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The problem with call-in shows is quite simple, if you only dare to admit it: Democracy is best when not everyone can be heard all the time. If we are constantly reminded of all the stupid things that people say and think, it becomes rather difficult to remember the good and noble arguments for everyone to be able to participate and decide.

A "racist" thinks themselves better than other races. An "elitist" thinks they are better than everyone.

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

No," Foyle roared. "Let them hear this. Let them hear everything.""You're insane, man. You've handed a loaded gun to children.""Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?""What are you talking about?""Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open." Foyle laughed savagely. "I've ended the last star-chamber conference in the world. I've blown that last secret wide open. No more s

There are some among the so-called elite who are overbearing and arrogant. I want to foster leaders, not elitists.

pessimists see people as liabilities to manage, as burdens or threats that we must minimize.

No greater mistake can be made than to assume that newspapers are correct indices of public opinion.

Feelings of superiority always stem from an illusion.

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists]

They loved their country largely because they controlled it.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became busin