Elites Quotes & Sayings

Elite is not a bad word, it's an aspirational one — Aaron Sorkin

I am the nightmare. — Marie Lu

[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy. — Michael Parenti

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. — P. J. O'Rourke

They were the best of friends as long as they did not know they were supposed to be enemies. The truth would do its damage soon enough.
- Brothers in Fire, by Jedtare — Marie Lu

The perpetually indignant elites inhabited a self-contained echo chamber of boardrooms, golf clubs, dinner parties and private media. They thought they were Venezuela. They could not see how their hysterics repelled and radicalised less-privileged compatriots. Thus they kept lunging and, in election after election, would keep losing. — Rory Carroll

Trusting me is a dangerous game, mi Adelinetta. — Marie Lu

I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss "the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,"6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding "political correctness" becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don't like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words — Joan C. Williams

To be chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive, but a compassionate choice. Our minds have great difficulty in coming to grips with such a reality. Maybe our minds will never understand it. Perhaps it is only our hearts that can accomplish this. Every time we hear about 'chosen people', 'chosen talents', or 'chosen friends', we almost automatically start thinking about elites and find ourselves not far from feelings of jealousy, anger, or resentment. Not seldom has the perception of others as being chosen led to aggression, violence, and war. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

We were never meant to exist, Adelina," he says. "And we will never exist again. But we cannot take the entire world with us." He meets my gaze. "No matter how it has wronged us. — Marie Lu

As always with any discussion of elite immunity, it's crucial to note that what makes this development such a particularly warped travesty is that the very same elites who enjoy this immunity have created the world's largest, and the Western world's most oppressive and merciless, penal state for ordinary citizens. — Glenn Greenwald

You are so full of light," I say after a moment. "You align with joy, and I with fear and fury. If you could see into my thoughts, you would surely turn away. So why would you stay with me, even if return to Kenettra and resume our lives?"

"You paint me as a saint," he murmurs. "But I aligned with greed solely to prevent that."

Even now, he can make my lips twitch with a smile. "I'm serious, Magiano."

"As am I. None of us are saints. I have seen your darkness, yes, and know your struggle. I won't deny it." He touches my chin with one hand. At this gesture, the whispers seem to settle, pushed away where I can't hear them. "But you are also passionate and ambitious and loyal. You are a thousand things, mi Adelinetta, not just one. Do not reduce yourself to that. — Marie Lu

If I've learned anything from my past and my present, it's the power of fear. You can give your subjects all the generosity in the world, and still they will demand more. But those who are afraid don't fight back. I know this well enough. — Marie Lu

too - my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world's population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites - is proof enough that we don't deserve a future. I — Lidia Yuknavitch

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

Relationships based on deals between leaders or ruling elites tend to collapse amid popular anger. — Stephen Kinzer

The political terms 'will' and 'popular will' have a long track record in Western history going back to Rousseau. That record is profoundly anti-democratic, essentially inviting elites to interpret what the common people believe and want. In litigious modern America, that would be a judicial elite telling us how we meant to vote or should have voted. — John Leo

Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy. — Hugo Chavez

The Tea Party elites gained extraordinary influence by being able to funnel millions of undisclosed dollars into campaigns with ads that distort the truth and attack government. — Chuck Schumer

The breakup of the Soviet Union is a national tragedy on an enormous scale only the elites and nationalists of the republics gained. — Vladimir Putin

Although Adam Smith is today often regarded as a "conservative" figure, he in fact attacked some of the dominant ideas and interests of his own times. Moreover, the idea of a spontaneously self-equilibrating system - the market economy - first developed by the Physiocrats and later made part of the tradition of classical economics by Adam Smith, represented a radically new departure, not only in analysis of social causation but also in seeing a reduced role for political, intellectual, or other elites as guides or controllers of the masses. — Thomas Sowell

There has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee. — Noam Chomsky

To put it another way: a conference is an elite meeting on equal terms; a congress is a group of elites meeting on opposite terms; a convention is a mob meeting on equal terms; a course is an elite instructing a mob; and a colloquium is a group capable of considering all these phenomena. — Malcolm Bradbury

How long will we stand in silence while half of our nation is chained by ancient, outdated laws? How long will we close our eyes to a tribal mentality that subjugates women in the most base and dehumanizing ways? How long will we hide in the shadows while the ruling elites bask in the rays of wealth and privilege? — Christian F. Burton

The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites. — Alex Pareene

Do what is best for most people, not just a few. Prevent your elites and growing middle class, those who often benefit most from growth and development, from turning into a special interests group that blocks reforms. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

When I was admitted to the University of Leiden, I expected to be presented with a single narrative of events and their significance and one explanation for why everything had happened as it did. Instead, the professors began every course with a central question; spent a lot of time on definitions and their importance; then presented key thinkers and their critics over time. My job as a student was to grasp the central question; to learn about the thinkers, their theories of power, political elites, mass psychology and sociology, and public policy; the methods by which they got to their conclusions; their critics and their methods of criticism. The point of all these exercises was to learn to improve on old ways of doing things through critical thinking. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

These were wannabe elites who, once they popped on big-boy pants, would be infiltrating New York with their pretentiousness. — Alexandra Martin

The new book by Nafeez Ahmed, based on very extensive and deep research, is by far the best on the 9/11 syndrome. Articulating and documenting what many feel, and empowering them into action, the book will have an impact on entrenched US empire elites unwilling and unable to take it on. Votes of thanks to Ahmed, and to Interlink! — Johan Galtung

The case for government by elites is irrefutable. — J. William Fulbright

Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many. — Eugene Jarecki

Britons seem to have given up on assimilating their Muslim population, with many British elites patting themselves on the back for their tolerance and multiculturalism. — Linda Chavez

Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. — David Harvey

What if you are wrong? What if the gods sent you, and indeed the rest of us, not because we were never meant to be, but because we were always meant to be? — Marie Lu

I look at my people, and I look at those who control them - the political elite. And the sad thing is that the elites are just not interested in the welfare of the people. — Youssou N'Dour

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired. — Harold Bloom

If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings. — Thomas Sowell

The male elites that run most countries are exceedingly uncomfortable with the subject of AIDS because it's a sexually transmitted disease. — Richard Holbrooke

We can never be sure just which other business cards are in the pocket of pundit, politician, or professor. We can't be sure, in short, just who our elites are working for. But we suspect it is not us. — Christopher L. Hayes

His words remind me of the strange whispers that have accompanied my illusions - something dark and vengeful, tempting and powerful. A weight presses on my chest. I am afraid. Intrigued. — Marie Lu

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

William Stegner ... coined the term 'the geography of hope,' countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few actually entered it. — Rebecca Solnit

The guiding principle of ruling elites was
and still is: When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed. — Michael Pare

The Kennedy lifestyle is something that is looked upon favorably by the elites throughout our culture, both political and social. — Rush Limbaugh

As society becomes more complex and opaque, as social processes seem more impersonal and autonomous, and as elites of 'experts' become more annoying, more people are tempted to think that some 'they' is manipulating 'us', using, among other dark arts, advertising. — George Will

We want to begin in working-class neighborhoods. We want to test the concept there, because our idea is that fair trade should not just be for the elites, but for everyone, for the majority, for the poor people. Quality food for poor people. Why just quality for the rich? And at an equal price — Victor Suarez Melendez

Newt Gingrich has criticized 'New York elites' who ride the subway. One of those subway elites threw up on my pants this morning. — David Letterman

Well, I don't think most Americans are playing the super-PAC game. I think what you have is elites on both sides playing the super-PAC game. — Jack Abramoff

Our world today is in the grip of anti-capitalism. State bureaucracies ruling over anti-market policies have grown into ideological and political elites who arrogantly presume to know and dictate how we should all live and work. — Richard Ebeling

Don't forget one weapon just because of another," he says. A flicker of approval flashes in his eyes. "Or you'll find yourself skewered in no time."
"Then maybe you should know which weapons are real. — Marie Lu

The extremes to which Western elites will go to avoid blaming radical Islam for terrorism cripples our efforts to protect innocent Muslims. Terrified of offending butchers, we insist that we're the bigots, not them. We make excuses for monsters. — Ralph Peters

The more we can encourage entrepreneurship, particularly for young people, the more they have hope. That requires some reforms in these [African] governments: rooting out corruption, increased transparency and how government operates, making sure that regulations are not designed just to advantage elites, but are allowing people who have a good idea to get out there and get things done. — Barack Obama

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. — Ann Coulter

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite. — Paul Krugman

In today's world, the elites are growing even more comfortable with one another across national lines, yet at the same time, less comfortable with low-income people who share their nationality. How we create those bonds of community that are truly global as well as national is one of our generation's great challenges. — Jacqueline Novogratz

It's the invincible arrogance of Europe's elites that gets me. These are people who have seen the euro collapse. These are people who are presiding over a migration crisis on their borders, and yet do they ever acknowledge that they need to change? No. They say they need more integration, more of our money, more control over this country. — Michael Gove

On an individual level, the human condition changed day by day, even hour by hour, and while you were soaking in self-pity over a misfortune, you might miss an opportunity for a redeeming triumph. And for every act of inhumanity, the species managed to committ a hundred acts of kindness; so if you were the type to brood, you would be more sensible if you dwelt on the remarkable goodwill with which most people treated others even in a society where the cultural elites routinely mocked virtue and celebrated brutality.
BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
Chapter 5 — Dean Koontz

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control - "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. — Noam Chomsky

The absolute worst I have ever been treated, the worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, are by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia. — Clarence Thomas

Finally, it is also worth noting that nearly every institution of post-independence India has been spearheaded by Brahminical elites. Their dismal performance in delivering even basic social services to the majority of Indians - of education, health, water, sanitation, and electricity - says volumes about their 'merit' and argues against leaving them in control of these institutions. — Namit Arora

You cannot harden your heart to the future just because of your past. You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others. — Marie Lu

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up. — Cornel West

In a normal democracy, you protect the individual from the excessive power of the state. In Turkey, power elites try to protect the state - as if this state were fragile and needed protection - when in fact, it's too powerful already. — Elif Safak

As a longtime fan of talk radio, I'm very worried about the low opinion that conservative hosts and callers have of the American artist. Art is portrayed as a scam, a rip-off and snow job pushed by snobbish elites. — Camille Paglia

Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. — Yuval Noah Harari

If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation's political and financial elites - as we have done - what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain? — Glenn Greenwald

The European Union, which is not directly responsible to voters, provides an irresistible opportunity for European elites to seize power in order to impose their own vision on a newly socially regimented Europe. — Maggie Gallagher

The first time Raffaele ever saw Adelina, it was a stormy-wracked night that changed her life and, indeed, the world. He recalls looking down from the window in his Dalia lodging to see a girl with silver-bright hair, conjuring an illusion of darkness such that he had never seen. He remembers the day she first came to his chambers in Estenzia, when Enzo was still alive and she was still innocent, and the way she looked up at him with her uncertain, damaged gaze. He remembers her test, and what he said to Enzo that night. How long ago that had been. How he had judged her wrongly. — Marie Lu

I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. — Russell Brand

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live.
Where's that?
Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there. — John McCain

Modernity has only lasted less than a dozen generations, while orthodox Christianity has already flourished for more than four hundred generations and shows no sign of fatigue. Yet orthodoxy seems like a newcomer in the university and to the cultural elites, since that is where it has been most forgotten. — Thomas C. Oden

The ability to choose who governs us, and the freedom to change laws we do not like, were secured for us in the past by radicals and liberals who took power from unaccountable elites and placed it in the hands of the people. — Michael Gove

The day will come when we strike you down," she's saying. "Mark my words. We will haunt your nightmares."

I clench my fists and fling an illusion of pain across her body. "I am the nightmare. — Marie Lu

They couldn't hurt Gansey. Nothing could hurt him; people who said money couldn't buy everything hadn't seen anyone as rich as the Aglionby boys. They were untouchable, immune to life's troubles. Only death couldn't be swiped away by a credit card. — Maggie Stiefvater

Slavery wasn't a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn't a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn't a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn't a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. — Naomi Klein

In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were. — Tracy Kidder

What unified the Balochis in their quest to regain self-determination, which resulted in the 'existing state'? On the one hand, authoritarianism, militarization, and conquest has robbed them of their history and put them into the do or die situation. On the other hand, natural resources which would allow the citizens at large to achieve a respectable existence have been controlled by the military or political elites, well connected to feudal political elites in Pakistan. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries. — Ron Paul

The elites - or managers in companies - no longer control the conversation. This is how insurrections start. — Marc Benioff

As masters of the bond market, the Rothschilds were already more feared than loved. Reactionaries on the Right lamented the rise of a new form of wealth, higher-yielding and more liquid than the landed estates of Europe's aristocratic elites. As Heinrich Heine discerned, there was something profoundly revolutionary about the financial system the Rothschilds were creating: — Niall Ferguson

In Parton's telling, the Village is "a permanent D.C. ruling class who has managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth."17 It's not just the activist base of the left and the right who have recognized the widespread elite failure; more and more individual elites have broken ranks to acknowledge their own responsibility. — Christopher L. Hayes

The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast "antipolitics machine", sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. They stand in the way of potentially bracing and instructive debates about social policy, the meaning of intelligence, the selection of elites, the value of equity and diversity, and the purpose of economic growth and development. They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public--while excluding the public from debate--that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely taking transparent technical calculations. — James C. Scott

Even Hollywood millionaires are now clamoring for legal protections for their illegal-alien nannies and gardeners, though such elites would hardly countenance a similar legal laxity that would allow foreign film technicians, screenwriters, and actors to flood southern California to work in their industry for a fourth of their own pay. — Victor Davis Hanson

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. — Nick Cohen

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

People are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks. — Anonymous

The interesting point is that the polarization is not so much among the public, although there's some of that. The polarization on the immigration issue is really between the elites and the public. In other words, this is not so much a right-left issue, which it is partly. — Mark Krikorian

The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One — Harold Bloom

An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. — Pankaj Mishra

Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century's elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian's case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy. — John Ralston Saul

The gods gave us powers, Adelina, because we are born to rule. — Marie Lu

they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, — Yuval Noah Harari

The anger I felt when the ACLU tried to disenfranchise me because my religious stayed with me. These are dangerous people who make dangerous arguments. Some powerful members of the cultural elites in our country are so paralyzed by the fear that theistic notions might reassert themselves in the official activities of government that they will go to Gestapo lengths to inhibit such expression. — Henry Hyde

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the elites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. — Ken Auletta

(T)he most important reason American leftists love France is that French elites say bad things about America. French intellectuals call us racist, stupid, imperialistic, simplistic, etc. ' and that alone is proof of their intellectualism. So long as you call America "racist," you could add that an enema is as good as a toothbrush and some professor of "communications theory" would applaud. — Jonah Goldberg

We must not allow our elected officials -many beholden to unaccountable corporate elites- to bastardize and pulverize the precious word democracy as they fail to respect and act on genuine democratic ideals — Cornel West

Prohibitionism is based on the premise that citizens will refrain from behaviors that are deemed immoral or harmful if such behaviors are decreed unlawful and criminal, even though such behaviors do not harm or unreasonably endanger others without their informed consent. Prohibitionism stems from totalitarian paternalism, an ideology rather prevalent among governing elites around the world, based on the presumption that people are feeble, foolish and irresponsible, needing constant protection from themselves. — Jeffrey Dhywood

China has already more millionaires than Japan, Germany, and Great Britain combined. Only in US politics, where the ruling elites belong to the dinosaurs, does the myth of Chinese lack of creativity hold its sway. — Thorsten J. Pattberg

Violetta's voice trembles. "Raffaele is saying that all of us, all Elites, are in danger."

That we are doomed to be forever young. — Marie Lu

One thing that's important to point out is that this kind of populism has a long and mixed history. It's part of this tradition of problematic anti-elitism where the elites are always the liberal class - the intellectuals, the professors, the artists - and not the economic elites. Why are we so mad and aggrieved at newspaper editors but not at corporate executives? I think we need to look more at the latter, at economic elites. — Astra Taylor