Elites Quotes - Page 13

• Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.

  Colin Powell

  Real, Exercise, Data

  Colin L. Powell, Joseph E. Persico (2010). “My American Journey”, p.102, Ballantine Books

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• More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Technology, Impact, Political

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• 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

  People, Done, Savannah

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• Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Dance, Determination, Artist

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  Opposites, Way, Groups

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• It's like these people are programmed by Karl Rove. What he wants is to have liberal critics ridicule Bush because he says 'nucular' and 'misunderestimate' and talks with a probably fake Texas accent and so on, because then can come back with the big propaganda apparatus saying, 'See, those elite liberals who run the world and are sitting around drinking French wine and eating quiche don't understand us ordinary guys'; regular guys like the guy working on the assembly line and George Bush, who is going back to his ranch to cut brush.

  Noam Chomsky

  Running, Drinking, Wine

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• The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.

  Maggie Gallagher

  Rights, White, Racism

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• Yes I know my enemies. They're the teachers who taught me to fight me, compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite, all of which are American dreams.

  Zack de la Rocha

  Dream, Teacher, Ignorance

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• The end goal is to get everybody chipped, to control the whole society, to have the bankers and the elite people control the world.

  Aaron Russo

  Freedom, People, Goal

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• Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence.

  James Bryant Conant

  Excellence, Aristocracy, Calling

  James Bryant Conant (1942). “Our Fighting Faith: Five Addresses to College Students”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

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• To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control.

  Rupert Murdoch

  Kings, Technology, Media

  "His Space". Interview with Spencer Reiss, www.wired.com. July 1, 2006.

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• If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’re very Pro-Gun, you just believe that only the Government (which is, of course, so reliable, honest, moral and virtuous…) should be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small, political elite and their minions.

  Stefan Molyneux

  Believe, Gun, Government

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• It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.

  Naomi Klein

  Moving, Mirrors, Doors

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• Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how....and when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded as the rest of us

  Chris Hedges

  Jobs, War, Self

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• Lampard, for me, was a marvellous servant for Chelsea, but I didn't think of him as an elite international footballer. And I am one of the few who felt Gerrard was not a top, top player.

  Alex Ferguson

  Player, Thinking, Servant

  "Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography". Book by Alex Ferguson, www.mirror.co.uk. 2013.

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• If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe

  Peter L. Berger

  Europe, Way, Ifs

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• Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it.

  Bill Keller

  Nice, Media, Rings

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• Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Men, Feminist, Academia

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.62, Harvard University Press

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• Am I not allowed to have my pride? Or is that an emotion reserved for the elite?

  Julia Quinn

  Pride, Emotion, Reserved

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• Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to.

  Gilda Radner

  Cancer, Clubs, Membership

  "Psycho-Oncology". Book by Fred Goodwin (p. 2), 2000.

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• South Africa is labouring to find its revolutionary path; the colours of the Rainbow Nation have difficulty blending together; the wealthy elites (white, black or Indian) profit from de facto segregation.

  Tariq Ramadan

  White, Rainbow, Black

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• Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference.

  Jackie Kennedy

  People, Watches, Culture

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• We look at science as something very elite, which only a few people can learn. That's just not true. You just have to start early and give kids a foundation. Kids live up, or down, to expectations.

  Mae Jemison

  Kids, People, Giving

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• We must ask why apparently general musical abilities should be restricted to a chosen few in societies supposed to be culturally more advanced. Does cultural development represent a real advance in human sensitivity, or is it chiefly a diversion for elites and a weapon of class exploitation?

  John Blacking

  Music, Real, Class

  John Blacking (1974). “How Musical is Man?”, p.4, University of Washington Press

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• What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind

  C. Wright Mills

  Mean, Men, Keys

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Power Elite”, p.28, Oxford University Press

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