Meritocratic Quotes & Sayings

I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied
that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work - just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege. — Leonard Cohen

Economic growth is quite simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope, which must create specific institutions for the purpose and not rely solely on market forces or technological progress. — Thomas Piketty

There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moment they were born. The second are the meritocratic: They were born with brains and couldn't fail if they tried. Because very few in Middletown fall into the former category, people assume that everyone who makes it is just really smart. To the average Middletonian, hard work doesn't matter as much as raw talent. It's — J.D. Vance

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted ... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded. — Bharati Mukherjee

The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic. — David Miliband

Even in its third century, America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world. — Victor Davis Hanson

His eyes were the brightest, most unnatural blue I had ever seen, a toxic cerulean. — Courtney Allison Moulton

One must cease letting oneself be eaten when one tastes best: that is known to those who want to be loved long. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The meritocratic spectrum of self-determinist, self-help, books are as follows: on one end there's the _ steps towards a path to true bliss. On the other end of the spectrum there's the _ steps to cope with not reaching a path of true bliss. — Chester Elijah Branch

This was a far cry from the meritocratic Ottoman period, when only by dint of an education could a man of humble background hope to rise through the ranks, get rich, and become a pasha. — Orhan Pamuk

I don't believe in creating dynastic wealth.
I don't really believe that in a society that aspires to be meritocratic and that believes in equality of opportunity - my kids have had advantage over 99 percent of the kids in the country ... — Bill Gates

Every time I hear writers talk about 'the muse,' I just want to bitch-slap them. It's a job. Do your job. — Nora Roberts

How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character. — David Brooks

There's a reason Bath & Body Works doesn't have a line of products called Huge Fucking Squirrel. — Kevin Hearne

By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33 — Thomas Piketty

Beppu (n.)
The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page. — Douglas Adams

This cultural, technological, and meritocratic environment hasn't made us a race of depraved barbarians. But it has made us less morally articulate. Many of us have instincts about right and wrong, about how goodness and character are built, but everything is fuzzy. Many of us have no clear idea how to build character, no rigorous way to think about such things. We are clear about external, professional things but unclear about internal, moral ones. What the Victorians were to sex, we are to morality: everything is covered in euphemism. — David Brooks

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based. — Thomas Piketty

At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import ... But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal — Christopher L. Hayes

Knowing that organisations are at the core of our society, it then becomes clear that humanity needs these organisations to prosper. There, the creation of a transparent, accessible, dynamic and meritocratic organisation model can generate sustainable organisations and as a result, a sustainable society — Miguel Reynolds Brandao

What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority. — Immanuel Wallerstein

Whales only get harpooned when they come to the surface, and turtles can only move forward when they stick their neck out, but investors face risk no matter what they do.. — Charles Jaffe

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. Inequalities must therefore be just and useful to all, at least in the realm of discourse and as far as possible in reality as well. — Thomas Piketty

Infosys was going to be a different type of company. It was going to be very ethically run, meritocratic, quality-conscious, transparent. People didn't confuse the personal with the corporate. — Nandan Nilekani

[Scientific humanism is] the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature. — Edward O. Wilson