Quotes About Elites

For those local and international elites who maintain control over most of the world's wealth, social revolution is an abomination. Whether it be peaceful or violent is a question of no great moment to them. Peaceful reforms that infringe upon their profitable accumulations and threaten their class privileges are as unacceptable to them as the social upheaval by revolution.

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.

In the 1950s and 60s, geopolitical intrigues did not much engage masses in Asia and Africa; it was something for elites to sort out.

I said that liberals think people who live in the middle of the country are a bunch of jerks, and obviously all liberals don't think that. But I will tell you what, an awful lot of liberal elites think that.

I volunteered to join Mr. Trump's campaign because he is a champion of working families, not Washington-Wall Street elites.

Inflation via loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that does not have to be legislated and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than monetary assets.

In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War I. In Latin America, by contrast, elites usually pulled back from interstate conflicts precisely to avoid having to turn to the masses for help.

Hoje em dia, (…) chegámos a um ponto em que os cidadãos se distraem com as teorias conspirativas mais bizarras sobre o modo como o governo está a ser manipulado por elites obscuras para lhes retirar os seus direitos, e armam-se em antecipação do momento em que terão de se defender do Estado pela força.

Societies seek to enforce basic social rules universally, but a rule of law that protects citizens against arbitrary actions of the state itself is often initially applied only to a minority of privileged subjects. The law, in other words, protects the interests of the elites who are close to the state or who control the state, and in that sense law resembles what Socrates in Plato's Republic labels the "justice of a band of robbers.

Europe's exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace.

This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth. I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life.

Soviet and Afghan Communists purposefully decimated the country's educated elites, executing or exiling traditional leaders. By the time I turned up, this culling had left much of the field to radical preachers and armed opportunists.

The people are rejecting so-called free trade and globalization that the elites presented as a positive thing.

Populists love rich people. They just hate professionals.

The cliques formed a shadow government in C-K, a moral parallel to the distracted formal rule of the Queen's Advisors. Clique elites moved behind the scenes, imitating their paragon Wellspring in deliberate webs of self-spun obfuscation. The forms of power and its realities had been gently disentangled.

Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.

The military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time, diminished other issues, made people choose sides in the one contest that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of the Revolution whose interest in Independence was not at all obvious. Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations—consciously or not—that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.

They have acted like carnivores who used the world to enrich only themselves, and whether it's the election of Donald Trump, or Brexit, the elites have realized that the people have stopped listening to them, that the people want to determine their futures and, in a perfectly democratic framework, regain control of their destiny.

Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf.

The hostility between India and Pakistan has become a habit to which both the elites have become addicted. Any attempt towards a rational solution to real problems is denounced by chauvinists on both sides.

Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together, that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.

Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world's elites, regardless of partisan affiliation. Still, its strictest and most dogmatic adherents remain where the movement started: on the US right.

our elites used the "crisis" to shut down Western norms of liberty, the human-centered world, and civilization itself.