Quotes About Elites

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.

Usually it is said that periodic droughts cause bad crops and therefore starvation. But it is the elites of starving countries that propagate this idea. It is a false idea. The unjust or mistaken allocation of funds and national property is the most frequent source of hunger. There was a lot of grain in Ethiopia, but it had first been hidden by the rich and then thrown on the market at a doubled price, inaccessible to peasants and the poor.

Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He's the one not to believe because he's the elite and the elites are against the people

In the United States the most able men are rarely placed at the head of affairs

So it was not superior thinkers, inventors or businesses that made Europe rich, but the fact that European elites were less successful in obstructing them... This is somewhat similar to our era of globalization. More countries, in more places, now have access to the sum of humanity's knowledge, and are open to the best innovations from other places... If progress is blocked in one place, many others will continue humanity's journey. (217-218)

Civil society space provides the oxygen for citizens to participate and meaningfully hold their governments and the private sector to account - and ensure that decisions are made in the interest of the majority and not the few. Without it, citizens have limited space to dissent and challenge the elites.

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.

My guess is that while the elites would like cleaner air, they are not willing to give up the convenience of being able to use their cars at will to get it, perhaps because they believe (I suspect incorrectly) that they can protect themselves from the consequences of vehicular pollution by investing in air-conditioners and air purifiers.

There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Texas, to London, England.

Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as

If democratic majorities come to believe that transferring social control to governmental and private institutional elites is necessary to guarantee virtue and safety, then it will happen.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, "it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites" working through their "well-developed networks and powerful institutions."24 This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse.

Some people charge that Obama is a socialist. He isn't a socialist in the precise sense of the word. He supports corporate medicine, central banking and international banking elites, the military-industrial complex, and, with great exuberance, the surveillance-industrial complex.

especially with its ruling elites of colonial European administrators and settlers, early twentieth-century Africa had been as socially and culturally complex as sixteenth-century Europe.

The idea of Sufism as a vaguely deist, New-Age-style philosophy with lots of poetry, alcohol and soft drugs is also immensely appealing to members of Pakistan's Westernized elites, whom it permits to follow a Westernized and hedonistic lifestyle without feeling that they have broken completely with their religion and its traditions.

Again in Russia, we find a tiny group of zealots—calling themselves "the majority" (Bolsheviks)—who planned to control everything from a central authority. Lenin wrote most of the "scientific" program for a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, which was then debated and modified by other communist leaders. Socialism had to be imposed from above, by educated elites. There would be no from-the-bottom-up modifications.

for most Americans, our most precious possession is citizenship in this amazing country. That endowment is being bartered away by our elites in exchange for votes, for profits, or for campaign dollars.

McGovern's revenge also represents the Democrats' switch from a party of blue-collar workers to a party of urban elites—feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender-rights activists. Back when Democrats still claimed to represent working Americans, they opposed illegal immigration. Since being taken over by the Far Left, all that matters to them is changing the electorate to one that doesn't mind liberal insanity.

the Democrats' switch from a party of blue-collar workers to a party of urban elites—feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender-rights activists.

Indeed, for social solidarity to take widespread hold, it may be especially important that elites—the "rich," the "learned," and the "authorities"—undergo their share of the suffering

The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.

It is the elites who are loosening their allegiances and workers who are reaching for national flags.

Summers complained of 'the development of stateless elites whose allegiance is to global economic success and their own prosperity rather than the interests of the nation where they are headquartered'.75