Quotes About Meritocracy

Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability.

One of our main objectives is to restore meritocracy within research and academia, where cronyism is also widespread. We also want to give money back to public research that is dying.

The term 'meritocracy' was coined by socialist theoretician Michael Young, who crafted the party's 1945 election manifesto.

And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?

But the person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance.

ability promoted regardless of background.

Since Rockefeller believed in meritocracy, not aristocracy, he favored educational opportunities for minorities.

Among the things he passed on to me were the belief that all men and women, regardless of their color or religion, are created equal and that individuals determine their own destiny; that is, it's largely their own ambition and hard work that determine their fate in life.

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.

We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.

When hereditary wealth, the privileges of rank, and the prerogatives of birth have ceased to be, and when every man derives his strength from himself alone, it becomes evident that the chief cause of disparity between the fortunes of men is the mind.

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

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence.

In our democracy every young person should have an equal opportunity to obtain a higher education, regardless of his station in life or financial means.

You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom.

Ability is what will get you to the top if the boss has no daughter.

Primus inter pares [First among equals].

employers have resorted to requiring a college degree. They do this not for anything the employee may have learned in college but to ensure that he will be able to read and count, and will show up on time. It's a mechanism, that's all. It helps keep the government overseer off their backs, lest they exert a human judgment not approved by their betters. So

We should get rid of the SAT as fast as we can. Look, there are bigger problems in society. This is not the biggest problem we have. But it's so easy to get rid of it. Right? Just pull the plug.

Politics is a pure meritocracy. That's why Gordon Brown's cabinet had two brothers and a married couple in it. They just happened to be the best people around.

I never want to get a job because I'm female. I want to get it because I earned it and I deserve it... Whether my hair is going to be blue or purple, people should be judged on how well they do the job and deliver results and whether they do it the right way. That's how I like to be judged; most people are like that.

You don't ask if an aircraft is being flown by a man or a woman - if it flies, it means it's doing the job it is meant to. The same is with cinema, and all that matters is whether the film works or not.

As Americans, I think we really believe that with the meritocracy that exists in our country, the equality of opportunity is so important to the foundation of our culture and our society.

My whole freshman year at Duke, it was drilled into me that nothing was given to you, and you have to earn it, and this is a dog-eat-dog world, and blah blah blah, and blah blah blah. And you buy into it, 100 percent. You end up loving it. That's the way it should be, right?