Quotes About Elitism

There are no credentials. They do not even need a medical certificate. They need not be sound either in body or mind. They only require a certificate of birth -just to prove they are first of the litter. You would not choose a Spaniel on these principles. (On aristocracy)

Snobbery - the "pox Britannica"

Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.

I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can't get into them. That's the point.

The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people - really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you're a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.

Such businesses only care about the pool of funds available to the very rich.

So class envy doesn't originate from a truck driver in South Alabama, but from a New York or Washington, D.C., Ivy League–educated IYI (say Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz) with a sense of entitlement, upset some "less smart" persons are much richer.

As club members know, the very purpose of a club is exclusion and size limitation.

Borlaug seldom replied directly, though the attacks stung. In private, he told friends that most of the criticism was sheer elitism. Somehow rich environmentalists in the West thought the world was better off if people in poor areas didn't improve their lives. He had nothing against organic this or that but it was unrealistic to promote it as a solution to hunger in the world of 10 billion. And it was immoral to stand in the way of feeding hungry people.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

The hatred expressed by vigilante groups for people of color, along with Jews and Muslims, is matched by their hatred for the college-educated elite. The vigilantes see people of color, along with those who espouse the liberal social values of the college-educated elites, including gun control, as contaminants to society.

Hillary is the Mitt Romney of 2016, where she has very little in common with the average person. She doesn't drive herself anywhere, she doesn't put on her own makeup, she doesn't cook her own meals, and she doesn't research her own materials. She has very little in common with the average woman.

Jotkut saavat perimässä poikkeuksellisen paljon typeryysgeenejä ja kuuluvat näin ollen syntymästään lähtien typerysten eliittiin.

What's the point of merit that exists only to protect privilege?

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

think people like her—like Pandora and Young and Redford—are incredibly arrogant. They've got money, looks, a certain amount of power and prestige. It makes them feel above the law.

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.

Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity

When you see the poet laureate saying that every child should have read 'Ulysses' and that you're just giving up on children if you think it's elitist - does that include children with special needs or whose first language isn't English?