Quotes from Adrian Wooldridge

Peter Drucker once noted that "no institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under the leadership of perfectly normal human beings." Warren Buffet made the same point more pithily: "I only invest in companies which any fool can run, because some day some fool will run it.

The past four decades have seen one of the most depressing developments in the history of the meritocratic idea: the marriage between merit and money.

They can also sell the same products in different ways to different groups of consumers (Britain's Viz magazine, with its fat slags and foul-mouthed yobs, is sold as a comic magazine in the south of the country but as an upmarket style guide in the north).

The Communist Party also claims that it is trying to promote political meritocracy: that is, a political system that aims to select and promote leaders on the basis of talents rather than on the basis of how many votes they can muster in an election.

but they agreed on one thing at least: that there is an inverse relationship between being well turned out and having something to say. Rand talked about people whose careers "depend on keeping faces bland, remarks inconclusive and clothes immaculate".

In meritocratic society, people are individuals before they are anything else: masters of their fates and captains of their souls.32