Quotes About Elites

The '60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.

The difficulties of many European countries derive from their corporatism: state projects serving cronies and vast social protection programmes, both run by elites. These surged in the 1970s and 1980s.

No—what threatened ancient Atlantis was an upheaval of everything it stood for, and our records tells us, the ruling elites made it clear they would literally die and let everyone else on the planet die with them rather than give up their power and their lifestyle.

I often found it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe - plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, and laden with promise.

Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites.

Page 9: Whereas civil rights reform was driven by a mass-based social movement and was characterized by intense controversy, polarized voting blocs, regional tension, and high media visibility, immigration reform was primarily an inside-the-beltway effort, engineered by policy elites largely in the absence of public demand or controversy.

Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce haemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.

don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.

In the public eye, being a victim of past injustices does not win the right to propagate current and future ones, and that's intolerable to those in charge of the race industry today, whose power relies on maintaining forever a latent rage that can be turned on and off at the will of the nation's elites.

It was class against class in the immediate years after the Second World War, with the CIA helping the ruling elites to maintain their property and privilege against democracy.

The Greenbaum effect is the tendency of Americans to choose outlandish and unsupported conspiracy theories while ignoring the conspiratorial actions of political and economic elites that are backed by evidence.

But as usual, the common folk are wiser and more able to discern the truth of things than are the elites who claim to serve them.

I think that the elites have lived too long among themselves.

A politician who represents the interests primarily of economic elites must find other means of appealing to the masses. Such alternatives are provided by the politics of nationalism, sectarianism, and identity.

This mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure. The obstacles to achieving these necessary changes are posed not so much by the majority of the American public—though many in recent years have shown dismaying manipulability—but by officials and elites in both parties and by major institutions that consciously support militarism, American hegemony, and arms production and sales.

Revolutions can occur only when significant portions of the elites, and especially the military, defect or stand aside. Indeed, in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilize the population to help them overthrow the regime.

For [people] who have never experienced sudden, total defeat and the almost overnight disappearance of their political elites; who have never lived under foreign occupation; who do not know what Nazi pressure meant; who have never had to worry first and last about food and physical survival…the warning must be heeded: do not judge too harshly.

Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.

The] passive assertion of superstitious men waiting for Destiny to fell them . . . is an attitude that most sensible men and women can easily reject. But rejection means assuming responsibility. And in our elites there is no desire to initiate changes which would insert the concept of responsibility into that of power. Only a persistent public commitment by the citizenry could bring such a thing about.

Elites everywhere tend to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and

Only than the villains of the Hierarchy will turn their face to the man hooked by millennia of self treason and will realize that they are on the top of that pyramid due to the one they, the elites, have humiliated and brutalized elites who became what they are due to this MAN! They will realize that they are nothing without this man and only then they will know that they are no longer elites, but people!

The Trump method of bluster, ambiguity, threat, and parry created a sense of ongoing crisis. It alienated critics, strained overseas alliances, and exhausted the patience of the electorate. Populism identified real problems and acted as a check on unaccountable elites, but it was also susceptible to demagoguery, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories.

What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.