Cultural Elite Quotes & Sayings

Jewish families encourage pursuit of wealth accumulation, high-income careers, and investing. — H.W. Charles

What's wrong with "the new elite?" Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the "new elite" is that they're not an elite at all. That is, they aren't particularly smart, or competent. — Glenn Reynolds

The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures. — Paulo Freire

During this time period, architecture in the Ethiopian culture of D'mt has an "unmistakable South Arabian appearance in many details", although there is some debate as to whether these patterns can be attributed to large movements of people versus elite-driven cultural practices. Additionally, linguistic evidence suggests that this time period was when Ethiosemitic languages were introduced to Africa, presumably from southern Arabia. — David Reich

Why can't a democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'the catcher in the rye' and 'harry potter'? — Moby

I would never call myself cultural elite, but you might be cultural elite. — Adam McKay

There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other, and that's the health of the nation. — Rick Perlstein

We should reject the view that high culture, as the possession of an elite, is of no use to those who don't possess it. This is as false as the view that science or higher mathematics are useless to those who don't understand them. Scientific knowledge exists because a few talented people are prepared to devote their energy to pursuing it. That is what a university is for: and since you cannot pass on difficult knowledge without discriminating between the students who can absorb it and those who cannot, discrimination is a social good. The same is true of high culture. Those able to acquire it will be a minority and the process of cultural transmission will be critically impeded if that teacher must teach Mozart and Lady Gaga side by side to satisfy some egalitarian agenda. — Roger Scruton

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Elite athletes learn entitlement. They believe they are entitled to have women serve their needs. It's part of being a man. It's the cultural construction of masculinity. — Jackson Katz

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. — Naomi Klein

We deserve each other, Luis ... and I need you just as much as you need me. Hold me."
He steps closer, but hesitates.
"If I do, mi chava, I can't promise I'll be able to let you go. — Simone Elkeles

I spent the first years working in Jordan trying to learn as much as I could about what was taking place in the country, about where there were gaps in the development process that needed attention. Inevitably, there were certain common denominators which are fairly common to all developing societies, perhaps to all societies: that quality education be accessible to everyone, not just a limited elite few; the sustainable conservation of natural resources; the full engagement of women in national development; and the value of cross-cultural exchange and understanding to international relations. — Queen Noor Of Jordan

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite. — Dan Quayle

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. — Michael Eric Dyson

I'm not part of the cultural elite. I'm a down-home girl. Always have been, always will be. — Lauren Hutton

If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe. — Peter L. Berger

In virtually every Continental state at this time, aristocracies had to live with the risk that their property might be pillaged or confiscated. Only in Great Britain did it prove possible to float the idea that aristocratic property was in some magical and strictly intangible way the people's property also. The fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women today are willing to accept that privately owned country houses and their contents are part of Britain's national heritage is one more proof of how successfully the British elite reconstructed its cultural image in an age of revolution. — Linda Colley

When you are a journalist in the music business, as I was, you end up dying or going to the gym - I chose the gym. — Tony Parsons

Embedded in 'The New York Times' institutional perspective and reporting methodologies are all sorts of quite debatable and subjective political and cultural assumptions about the world. And with some noble exceptions, 'The Times,' by design or otherwise, has long served the interests of the same set of elite and powerful factions. — Glenn Greenwald

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be. — Kenneth Branagh

The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse. — Chris Hedges

We consume everything like potato chips. In this environment, I suspect the cartoonist's connection with readers is likely to be superficial and fleeting, unless he taps into some fervent special interest niche. And that audience, almost by definition, will be tiny. — Bill Watterson

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' — Isaac Asimov

Into darkness will I fade,
Into a night that Man has made,
But through that gloom shall gleam the sun
When I am lost, and again am won.

Release! Release! I call to thee
In new lands across the sea:
Let, another on narrow pathways, come to me.

Furthest and Highest,
yet not beyond reach.
Choose thou well a path that will teach
How the sunken is raised
and emptiness is filled
and a wandering heart
can finally be stilled.

Seek the great stone! Mark it well,with a sign.
That the one who shall follow
Shall see it is mine,
and seeing, shall ponder and certainly know
As the Ancients have writ: "As above, so below."

And I shall guard the Source of Greatness;
Waiting by a teardrop
From neither joy nor sorrow born,
In silver bound, beneath the ground,
I am the spiral horn. — Michael Green

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But — Andrew Klavan

Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference. — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society's "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world the power that creates the nation's real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political system. — Thomas Frank