Adolph A. Berle Jr. Quotes

The conservatives say they are protecting the values of society. They are protecting their privileges.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth

Our elite has not evolved in 20 years, and the instincts of this elite are not democratic.

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege, and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

I think Hollywood has a class system. The actors are like the inmates, but the truth is they're running the asylum.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

These guys were the real owners of the country, and for them to discuss with this young guy who becomes a member of the government was absolutely unacceptable.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

I don't like the royal family, I don't like the establishment, I don't like the civil service.

For most Americans nepotism is first and last a class issue—a way for the rich to warehouse their unemployable offspring while keeping the lower classes in their place. In fact however systematic nepotism has been practiced more or less continuously by both the upper and the lower classes without ambivalence or apology. It was the middle class that pushed the merit principle, rising as it did through the institutions of the market and the state.

Scratch a pessimist, and you often find a defender of privilege.

… egotists, exploiters and aristocrats

Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility.

The great families have their privileges.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

The position of what is generally called great people has of late become extremely difficult. They are more attacked and calumniated, and judged with less indulgence than private individuals. What they have lost in this way, they have not by any means regained in any other. Ever since the revolution of 1790 they are much less secure than they used to be, and the transition from sovereign power to absolute want has been as frequent as sudden.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.