Quotes About Elitism

#1. 'Worshipping in private,' as Obama does, comes off as just another form of annoying elitism.

Tina Brown

#2. Egalitarianism trumps elitism. Only a selfish fool will tell you otherwise

Jonny Oates

#3. To sneer at others for not believing the same as you is the height of arrogance and elitism, the top failings of any leader who governs at the grace of the people.

Robert J. Crane

#4. They're a nasty bunch of people. The Riot Club's sole purpose is to celebrate wealth, elitism, hedonism, and excess - just random acts of destruction and chauvinism, which is interesting because our Prime Minister, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Mayor of London were are a part of this club.

Max Irons

#5. Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.

Alex Kapranos

#6. The conviction which we must share and spread is that the call to holiness is directed to all Christians. This is not a question of privilege or of spiritual elitism. It is a question of a grace offered to all the baptized.

Pope John Paul II

#7. The language of elitism smells bad! It is not healthy to believe that we are the only ones to have captured truth and even less healthy to condemn others.

Jean Vanier

#8. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Florence King

#9. I love pop culture
the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that.
That's why I said I don't like elitism.

Haruki Murakami

#10. In every election cycle that I can recall, there comes a moment - or a few - where charges of elitism and claims of commonness are wielded by presidential candidates like a sword and shield: 'Vote for me 'cause I'm one of you. It's the other guy who's out of touch.'

John Ridley

#11. Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.

James Fenton

#12. The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco- populism . Ecopopulism ... To change our laws and culture , the green movement justice , political solutions and social change.

Van Jones

#13. Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.

Sydney J. Harris

#14. ...and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery.

Steven Moore

#15. There you have it: an expensive higher education based on sloganeering, on pat, trite phrases that substitute moral posturing for political reasoning. It's elitism masquerading as egalitarianism.

Camille Paglia

#16. Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it's actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.

Banksy

#17. Classical music is a genre of music. It's no more complex or less complex than pop music or R&B. The elitism is weird.

Theo Hutchcraft

#18. The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies wth a vision of social change which challenges class elitism.

Bell Hooks

#19. From the elitism of luxury to the democracy of beauty.

Giorgio Armani

#20. Don't say anything against indies. They're very sensitive. One hint of elitism and they'll be organizing a twitcott.

Josh Lanyon

#21. I think art has a right - not an obligation - to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.

Geoffrey Hill

#22. We must be careful to avoid spiritual elitism. Everything we are and anything we possess as believers in Christ is a gift of grace. Pure hearts before God must be cleansed from any hint of spiritual pride.

Beth Moore

#23. There's a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little American flag lapel pins.

Brit Hume

#24. [General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary.

Russell S. Bonds

#25. Wordsmiths who serve established power ... castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.

John Ralston Saul

#26. Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.

Robert Wyatt

#27. Being slim is the new elitism. Thinness today says that you are richer, smarter and more successful than the overweight masses.

David Zinczenko

#28. The very essence of school is elitism. Schools exist to teach, to test, to rank hierarchically to promote the idea that knowing and understanding more is better than knowing and understanding less.

William A. Henry III

#29. There's an elitism that comes out with the entertainment industry. I'll talk about some shows, but I'm not gonna say that you're dumb for watching one over the other. I just let it go. I don't have to declare a fatwa on any of these things. I've gotten over some of my elitism.

W. Kamau Bell

#30. To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.

Florence King

#31. For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority.

Alex Ross

#32. Acid is not for every brain ... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.

Timothy Leary

#33. The overarching issue, as I see it, is the elitism of America's political system; the fact that regular, ordinary Americans aren't considered in policy debates or legislation, and regularly get shafted by the powers-that-be in Washington.

Jerry Springer

#34. Populism and elitism are the same thing. They are class prejudices, crude class prejudices that so-and-so, because they are uneducated, is less worthy, or so-and-so, because they are richer or more educated, is unworthy.

David Brooks

#35. I find the elitism and blatant provincialism of many (Manhattan-based) New Yorkers unattractive. Just as place can be an identity crutch that helps a person feel individual, place can be a crutch in poetry.

Cate Marvin

#36. I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

Quentin Tarantino

#37. There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

Barack Obama

#38. When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.

Andrew O'Hagan

#39. Anything that is exclusive will be accused of elitism; living one's dreams will be called pretentious. So let's indulge the whim and see where it takes us.

Fennel Hudson

#40. And it's a ... it's a term 'Punk Rock' that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion , style , elitism, satanism , and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll.

Iggy Pop

#41. For all the claims of his detractors that Stewart is the epitome of East Coast elitism, there is more self-deprecating New Jersey grit here than arrogant Manhattan elan.

Anonymous

#42. The mother tongue of politicians is that of ancient Babylon: a language designed to severely limit discourse within a tower of praise to elitism, a language carried on breath's reeking of the fecal matter from their paymasters

Dean Cavanagh

#43. Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

Florence King

#44. English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#45. To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

Greg Carlson

#46. Feelings of superiority always stem from an illusion.

Marty Rubin

#47. I wonder why it is that the countries with the most nobles also have the most misery?

Francis Bacon

#48. Rich or poor, money rules with an iron fist.

Gary Hopkins

#49. And yet, strange to say, now that the truth [of natural selection] is recognized by most cultivated people ... now more than ever, in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further the survival of the unfittest.

Herbert Spencer

#50. They loved their country largely because they controlled it.

Tom Clancy

#51. pessimists see people as liabilities to manage, as burdens or threats that we must minimize.

Arthur C. Brooks

#52. Two principles have stood face-to-face from the beginning of time; and they will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.

Abraham Lincoln

#53. There are some among the so-called elite who are overbearing and arrogant. I want to foster leaders, not elitists.

Daisaku Ikeda

#54. The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity's tendency toward an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.

C.S. Lewis

#55. There is something wrong with this world." She stood like she was making a speech. "Something very wrong when it's the twenty-first century and this type of elitist travesty is still being perpetuated.

Alex Flinn

#56. [I]t is indisputably the mediocre, if not the low, both as regards morality and intelligence, who succeed in life and multiply the fastest.

Alfred Russel Wallace

#57. An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

#58. When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

Mark Twain

#59. He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.

David Halberstam

#60. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston S. Churchill

#61. What is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd? ...

John Geddes

#62. Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when the exceptionally able students hang out only with one another.

Charles Murray

#63. Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.

Van Wyck Brooks

#64. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken

#65. If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

Esther M. Friesner

#66. Class amusements, be they for Dukes or plow-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still, more or less sociable and universal; There's a place for every man who will come and take his part.

Thomas Hughes

#67. What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed?

Virginia Mae Axline

#68. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

Herbert Spencer

#69. 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

#70. These transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations

Samuel P. Huntington

#71. Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

Glenn Greenwald

#72. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Helen Keller

#73. [beware that] many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.

Thomas Sowell

#74. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always,
whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme
that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to
be such when it ceases to be aristocratic

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#75. Liberalism is not fond of fun, or at least of many forms of fun that many people like.

George F. Will

#76. A "racist" thinks themselves better than other races. An "elitist" thinks they are better than everyone.

A.E. Samaan

#77. The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won't find it because it is beneath them.

D.E. Navarro

#78. 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.

Marcel Proust

#79. 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

#80. If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts.

Michael Harris

#81. Morality is what the queen expects from the hive, not from herself.

Marty Rubin

#82. We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

Philip Zaleski

#83. Of England's patrician class, the author writes: It was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease.

Barbara W. Tuchman