Top 79 Quotes About Meritocracy
#1. Meritocracy is our social ideal, particularly among good liberals. Equality of opportunity, but not of outcome. Not evaluating people by their [outside] features, but by their innate talent and drive.
Chris Hayes
#2. America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.
Toby Young
#3. Silicon Valley is not a perfect meritocracy, but it is open to all who are highly motivated. For example, there is a dearth of women, Hispanics, and African Americans in Silicon Valley.
Deborah Perry Piscione
#4. I loved working on Wall Street. I loved the meritocracy of it and the camaraderie of the trading floor.
Chelsea Clinton
#5. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can't teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It's terrible.
Steve Jobs
#6. Creating a meritocracy requires equal participation by both the hippo, who could rule the day by fiat, and the brave smart creative, who risks getting trampled as she stands up for quality and merit.
Eric Schmidt
#7. Good deeds must be rewarded by the system and crimes be punished - this is the essence of meritocracy.
Imran Khan
#8. You can't have a competitive, egalitarian meritocracy if only some of your citizens have the opportunity for a good education.
Rupert Murdoch
#9. There is socialism in the family that conflicts with meritocracy. And that bothered me.
Uday Kotak
#10. The thing I like most about football is it's a meritocracy.
Andrew Luck
#11. An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.
Robert Bork
#12. I'm much more comfortable in a meritocracy and in reward for good work as opposed to a political environment, where I feel like all of that can be confused.
Desiree Rogers
#14. The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.
Doug Liman
#15. For a meritocracy to work, it needs to engender a culture where there is an "obligation to dissent".
Eric Schmidt
#16. Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
Eric Ries
#17. Let's make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.
Astro Teller
#18. People don't believe this, but Hollywood really is a meritocracy.
Rashida Jones
#19. The military is a meritocracy. It's an up or out. It's shaped like a pyramid.
Tanya Biank
#20. Comedians have varying levels of training. It can range from classically trained actors (like Robin Williams) to people who took comedy classes to folks who just started doing it. That's the beauty of comedy: it's close to a pure meritocracy.
Ted Alexandro
#21. Socialism is not a meritocracy. By definition it places increasingly confining restraints on those that succeed the most.
A.E. Samaan
#22. When it comes to work, there is a fear factor around meritocracy. People are afraid of being openly judged. However, when you know what you are being measured against, it's empowering.
Maynard Webb
#23. War is never a meritocracy for the casualties.
Harlan Coben
#24. A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#25. Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.
Timothy Noah
#27. The bottom line is that any business should be a meritocracy. The best and brightest. Period.
Billy Beane
#28. Perhaps it is the case that no organization or hierarchy can withstand the closest of scrutiny. Not even a smugly self-touted meritocracy. The success and persistence of utter fools everywhere is sad testament to that.
Ian C. Esslemont
#29. We don't have to sit by and watch our meritocracy be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth.
Robert Reich
#30. Generally speaking, companies get into bankruptcy as a kind of meritocracy. Somebody made some sort of big mistake, to get into bankruptcy, and very often, a part of the mistake is too much leverage.
Wilbur Ross
#31. People always knock what's new but I love the modern Internet, where cleverness is currency. Social media is a cleverness meritocracy. We're living in it.
Alexei Maxim Russell
#32. The modern world is a meritocracy where you earn your own luck, old school ties count for nothing, and inherited privilege can even lose a guy a clear parliamentary majority.
Kate Reardon
#34. Where the establishment emphasized humility, prudence, lineage, meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement, brains&self-betterment
Christopher Hayes
#35. This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#36. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#37. Meritocracy is a social arrangement like any other: it is a loose set of rules that can be adapted in order to obscure advantages, all the while justifying them on the basis of collective values. pg. 199
Shamus Rahman Khan
#38. the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned.
Thomas Piketty
#39. You don't need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are.
Matt Mullenweg
#40. One of the great joys of launching your idea on the web is that it's a meritocracy. The good stuff will rise to the top and find an audience, and you don't have to impress one idiosyncratic commissioning editor.
Rob Manuel
#41. So even as the meritocracy produces failing, distrusted institutions, massive inequality, and an increasingly detached elite, it also produces a set of very powerful and influential leaders who hold it in high regard.
Christopher L. Hayes
#43. There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.
Mitch Kapor
#44. We need democracy and meritocracy, not mockracy and hypocrisy.
TheKeyAuthor
#46. Los Angeles is such a great meritocracy. Where can someone with my background - don't have the right family background, the right religion, the right provenance or whatever you want to call it - I come here and I'm accepted. The city's been good to me. And I want to give back.
Eli Broad
#47. A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it's a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it's a meritocracy.
Steve Jobs
#48. I recognize that Hollywood is not about seniority. Often it's not even a meritocracy. It's about what you did yesterday. You have a couple of misses, and suddenly it's impossible to find a hit. So the swings are gigantic. But I've always understood it as such, and navigated it as such.
Ben Affleck
#49. All companies can benefit from fostering a more flexible environment (creating a place where the most talented, industrious, and entrepreneurial people want to work) and relinquishing hierarchical control to favor a results-oriented meritocracy.
Maynard Webb
#50. Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating.
Richard Rohr
#51. I grew up believing in meritocracy and the American dream. My parents came here from India. They had no connections. My brother and I went to public schools, and both of us succeeded.
Leila Janah
#52. We should strive to make our society more like Summer Showtime: Mostly a meritocracy, despite some vicious backstabbing. Everyone gets a spot in the chorus. Bring white shorts from home.
Tina Fey
#53. The web is a meritocracy, where passion and persistence are what place us in positions of influence.
Anonymous
#54. The Four Great Chinese Inventions - compass, gun-powder, paper, and print - are legendary. Less talked about are meritocracy and banknotes.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#55. Infosys is an absolute meritocracy. Even in a meritocracy, other things being equal, you have to give opportunity to the more experienced candidate.
N. R. Narayana Murthy
#56. It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?
Laura Wade
#57. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.'
Chris Hayes
#58. Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.
Ron Chernow
#59. When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.
Eric Ries
#60. Comedy is a meritocracy. If you are funny, you are there. If you are not, you are out.
Kevin Feige
#61. The meritocracy offered liberation from the unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but swapped in their place a new hierarchy based on the notion that people are deeply unequal in ability and drive.
Christopher L. Hayes
#62. The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.
Malcolm Gladwell
#63. If Anonymous and Lulzsec are the id of hacking, then physical hackerspaces are the heart of the higher-minded hacking ideals: freedom of information, meritocracy of ideas, a joy of learning and anti-authoritarianism.
Heather Brooke
#64. Yes, the United States is still the great meritocracy it's always been; but now, if you aren't brilliant or beautiful or both, there isn't much to do, because they can do it cheaper in Shanghai or Mumbai.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#65. The parental relationship sits outside the
the logic of meritocracy and is the closest humans come to grace.
David Brooks
#66. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston S. Churchill
#68. The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.
Charles Murray
#70. It's not your status as an orogene that bothers them. It's that you haven't yet proven yourself.
(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)
N.K. Jemisin
#71. Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.
Ayn Rand
#72. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
#73. And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I'm open for business, because I've got a better one than E pluribus unum. Tu dormis, tu perdis ... You snooze, you lose.
Paul Beatty
#74. If someone's deeds lower his position, his pedigree cannot elevate it.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#75. We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.
Derrick A. Bell
#76. 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
#78. One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#79. With a blade at your throat, a well-connected uncle or a wealthy mother could not save you. Only you could save yourself.
Natalia Marx
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