Diane Abbott Quotes

The bourgeois are other people.

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.'

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

As we ascend in society, like those who climb a mountain, we shall find that the line of perpetual congelation commences with the higher circles; and the nearer we approach to the grand luminary the court, the more frigidity and apathy shall we experience.

In India, if you are from the elite, dogs are extremely important. The breed of the dog indicates your wealth, that you are westernized. The cook, another human being, is on a much lower level than your dog. You see this all the time.

Washington has become this place that people don't leave. It has become this permanent feudal class.

Language does not make one an elite.

I try to not be or associate with elitists.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious organisations.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that's rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

The essence of American politics consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

I don't know why the Vice President thinks Mario Cuomo and I are members of the cultural elite. Maybe its because we both know how to spell potato.

Chile is still at the whim of powerful, traditional elites who sit as a higher societal authority than the elected government.

The great families have their privileges.

To see the futurity of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from them

The present King and Queen are popular, very, and increasingly so, but they have no message for the Labour Party who believe them, and rightly I fear, to be but the puppets of a Palace clique…. Still, it is the aristocracy which still rules England although nobody seems to believe it.

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.