Sargent Shriver Quotes

The anti-elitist values in America, I think, are very destructive to education.

When people are educated, class distinction disappears.

America is a meritocracy.

We live in a time where it's very much in vogue, constant search for pure utopian equality, and which, on one level, is quite amusingly silly but also on another probably very important.

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

I reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

The Tories and the Lib Dems talk about social mobility, but, short of winning the lottery, the only way to guarantee young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to do better and to raise aspirations is through education.

I really do think the things that make our society what it is are under threat. It should be about everyone having the potential to be what they're going to be.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

Distinction in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

There seems to be an idea abroad in this land as well as in others, that a certain class of people are for the purpose of producing servants for another class of people, and that this servant-producing class has no right to give their children an education that is calculated to elevate them above the position of their parents. We are not in sympathy with this idea.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

If a [democratic] society displays less brilliance than an aristocracy, there will also be less wretchedness.

Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down.

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.