Elitism Quotes

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

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.

C. Wright Mills

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

Francis Bacon

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

John McCain

They loved their country largely because they controlled it.

Tom Clancy

Feelings of superiority always stem from an illusion.

Marty Rubin

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

Harold Holzer

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

Arthur C. Brooks

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 secrets from now on.... No more telling the children what's best for them to know.... Let 'em all grow up. It's about

Alfred Bester

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

A.E. Samaan

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 to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?

David Mitchell

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

William A. Henry III

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.

Johan Hakelius

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

Winston S. Churchill

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

Daisaku Ikeda

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Philip Zaleski

[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 businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.

Nancy MacLean

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

Marty Rubin

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

William Henry III

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

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

George F. Will

...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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Gregory C. Carlson

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.

C.S. Lewis

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?

Virginia M. Axline

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.

Marcel Proust

Rich or poor, money rules with an iron fist.

Gary Hopkins

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

Criss Jami

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

Dan Rather

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

Ljupka Cvetanova

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

Glenn Greenwald

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 ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

Michel Foucault

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

Esther M. Friesner

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.

H.L. Mencken

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.

Helen Keller

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Haruki Murakami

I Am In Love With Myself, With My Heart.

Nirav Sanchaniya

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

Mark Twain

Elitism Quotes

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