H. W. Brands Quotes

The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

We have a perception problem with the party. We are perceived as being a coastal elite, Ivy League party that does not connect to working-class people. The waitress, the teacher, the construction worker - we've lost our connection to them.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

I understand politicos gotta make bank. But cloistering with the Hollywood elite is not how you prove you're a man of the people.

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

Reporters used to be blue-collar; at the Globe now, it's practically required that you have a trust fund.

I represent the working people. I’m not what you’d call a wine and cheese type of guy.

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

This is an impressive crowd -- the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

It's more than a little ironic that the mantra that swept Bill Clinton into office is exactly what prevented Hillary from winning it. Somehow, the Manhattan billionaire became the voice of the disaffected blue-collar middle class in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Trust me: I entertain Joe Six-Pack 30 weekends a year. I don't really think that I'm an elitist.

What's a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.

I volunteered to join Mr. Trump's campaign because he is a champion of working families, not Washington-Wall Street elites.

I'm not going to be one of those guys who changes, and all of a sudden I'm shaking hands and kissing babies.

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

All of my contemporaries in L.A. are all graduates of either Yale, Julliard, Trinity. The best of the bunch come from that.