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Elitism Quotes

Browse 131 quotes about Elitism.

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Elitism Quotes

“The common mob, the philistines and money changers, are 'flies in the market-place'. Then, as the Outsider's insight becomes deeper, so that he no longer sees men as a million million individuals, but instead sees the world-will that drives them all like ants in a formicary, he knows that they will never escape their stupidity and delusions, that no amount of logic and knowledge can make man any more than an insect; the most irritating of the human lice is the humanist with his puffed-up pride in Reason and his ignorance of his own silliness.”

HumanismIndividualityConformityRationalityElitism
Book:The Outsider
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“Nowadays, our leaders prefer to search for the causes of crime and poverty in the actions or inaction of those at the very bottom of society. The obscene transfers of wealth over the past forty years from that bottom to a privileged few at the top--and from much of the Third World to financial elites in the West--are all excused as the natural evolution of the Market, when, in fact, they are products of unparalleled greed by those who shape and direct that Market.”

WisdomWealthPovertyUnited StatesCrimeThird WorldWestern CultureElitism
Book:Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
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“Progressive women have grown accustomed to not only allowing the government to decide what is best for their children and their families, but they actively engage in protesting for more aspects of life to be overseen by elitist experts —many of whom do not even have children themselves.”

PoliticsWomenFamilyIdentityParentingElitismProgressivesGovernment Control
Book:Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future
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“Elitism & Fundamentalism (The Sonnet) Elitism and fundamentalism, Are both the enemies of progress. Exchanging one bad habit for another, Is not true advancement but regress. Fundamentalists used to fill the world, With the poison of dirty division. Today elitists poison the world, By endorsing snobbery and narcissism. Conscience, courage and compassion, These are the three pillars of progress. Without these all belief is delusion, All glitter is but a sign of coldness. Replace not fundamentalism with elitism. Grow out of selfishness into collectivism.”

Life LessonsHumanismFundamentalismCollectivismHumanist PoetryElitistElitismSnobberyMaterialistic SocietyHumanitarian Poem
Book:Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting
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“Why but Learning would not be made common. Yea but Learning cannot be too common, and the commoner the better. Why but who is not jealous, his Mistresse should be so prostitute? Yea but this Mistress is like ayre, fire, water, the more breathed the clearer; the more extended the warmer; the more drawne the sweeter. It were inhumanitie to coop her up, and worthy forfeiture to conceal her. Why but Schollers should have some privilege of preheminence. So have they: they onely are worthy Translators. Why but the vulgar should not knowe all. No, they can not for all this; nor even Schollers for much more: I would, both could and knew much more than either doth or can. Why but all would not be knowne of all. No nor can: much more we know not than we know: all know something, none know all: would all know all? they must breake ere they be so bigge.”

KnowledgeLearningAcademiaElitismClassismGatekeepingTown And Gown
Book:The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne
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“She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.”

HumorClassSocietyElitismCasteServants
Book:Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
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“Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites - kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers - who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.”

PoliticsHistorySocietyAgricultureElitismFarminging
Book:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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“The communism of the ruling caste of his best city can thus be derived from Plato’s fundamental sociological law of change; it is a necessary condition of the political stability which is its fundamental characteristic. But although an important condition, it is not a sufficient one. In order that the ruling class may feel really united, that it should feel like one tribe, i.e. like one big family, pressure from without the class is as necessary as are the ties between the members of the class. This pressure can be secured by emphasizing and widening the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. The stronger the feeling that the ruled are a different and an altogether inferior race, the stronger will be the sense of unity among the rulers. We arrive in this way at the fundamental principle, announced only after some hesitation, that there must be no mingling between the classes.”

PlatoTotalitarianismElitismCaste SystemRuling ClassPlatonism
Book:The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato
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“If anything, sources that have the support and protection of power and institutions should be treated as suspicious not superior. There are very few words that make me as nauseous as words like ‘prestige’ and ‘prestigious’. Prestige is often a shortcut for getting power’s approval and blessings, which automatically, in my view, should disqualify any intellectual from being taken seriously.”

PowerPropagandaControlPrestigeElitismHegemonyKnowledge ProductionSubaltern
Author:Louis Yako
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“In crew, contempt is important. In Boston, Boston University and Northeastern crew are treated with contempt by the college up the river. Intramural crew is treated with contempt. Nonathletic coxswains (Chinese engineering majors, poets) are treated with contempt. A true coxswain is a diminutive jock, raging against the pint size that made him the butt of so many jokes at Prep school. He runs twenty stadiums a day, his girlfriend is six feet one, and he can scream orders even when he has the flu (which he catches at least three times a winter).”

HumorCrewBostonHarvardAthleticsRowingElitismSnobberyPreppyPrep
Book:The official preppy handbook
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“Were the future leaders of the United States who had won coveted tickets to the highest echelons of the neoliberal meritocracy — the ones who were supposed to take over the newspapers, high political offices, and corporations — really demonstrating in the quads not about the military-industrial complex, wealth inequality, or America's endless foreign wars, but cosplay?”

LiberalismFanaticismElitismSjwIvy LeagueTumblrInternet CultureCosplayNeo LiberalismFan Culture
Book:It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office
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“[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!”

HistoryGeniusInsanitySympathyHolocaustElitismEgalitarianismEye OpeningSad TruthHuman Stupidity
Author:Arthur Koestler
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“This is the clandestine chess game that the high-level ruling class are playing my friends. Through their coordinated influence over key industries, governments, media outlets, education systems, and so on and so forth, they skillfully instigate mass panic and the collective perception of danger and chaos. This danger and chaos — whether it be personified through a charismatic dictator, terrorist organization, mystery virus, hostile weather change, or some other strategically inflated threat — is then weaponized to strip people of their introductory logic and rational thought; inculcate elaborate illusions that invert objective reality; weaponize the unconscious tribal mindset against the conscious thinking individual; suspend ordinary peacetime laws in favor of new authoritarian ones; and then present ‘solutions’ that serve to further consolidate Establishment power and reshape society as they see fit.”

World GovernmentElitismPopulation ControlHidden HistoryShadow Government
Book:A History of Elitism, World Government & Population Control
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