Elite Institutions Quotes

Holy shit. Sons of bitches – I wouldn’t have seen them. They don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve it. Ill tell you this, they are never – I’m surprised that we really have – who did this?... The Ivy League presidents? Oh, I wont let those sons of bitches ever in this white house again. Never. Never. None of them. They’re finished. The Ivy League schools are finished. My God-.

You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses.

I once thought that there was some chance that a Harvard professor would know something about politics.

Harvard was very important to me and has been very important to so many people for so many years.

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.

When I started in the press there were really ink-stained wretches. Not everybody went to college. Now, everybody at the New York Times and the Washington Post and Salon and Slate, most of them have Ivy League educations.

The Christian church in the U.S. is still strong numerically, but it has lost its decisive influence both in American public life and in American culture as a whole, especially in the major elite institutions of society.

I was an academic and I lost my assignment at Harvard. Meanwhile, [David Petraeus] gets invited to Harvard to become a fellow.

I went to great schools. Wharton School, a lot of great places.

Duke is in extremely competitive environment. In my high school, I think I got one B my whole four years. I was used to being the smartest kid in every class I was in, and then I went to Duke and suddenly I was the dumbest kid in every class. Everybody there is up to something.

My first qualification is I didn't go to Columbia Journalism School.

I don't believe the most successful people are the ones who got the best grades, got into the best schools, or made the most money.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Schools like Doon or Lawrence in Sanawar didn't decide to create leaders when they started. Look at their alumni list today, and you have a former prime minister, Olympic gold medallist, army generals, cabinet ministers, and leaders in different spheres. Some kind of training started at the school level itself that helped create leaders.

Enforced by genetics, sexual reproduction, perspective, and experience, the most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes-governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions- all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can't get into them. That's the point.

The SAT allows less-privileged students access to universities that previously were the bastions of the wealthy.

I talked my parents into sending me to Roedean at 16. I had this idea that if I could get into Cambridge, then I could join Footlights. My problem was that I went to a comprehensive in Brighton. I thought I'd have to start from a good school, and the best I could think of was Roedean.

I've always been fascinated with aristocracy. I'm really interested in the Ivy Leagues, the final clubs, all the really old-money families, the concept of old money.

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

It is harder to get into Deloitte than into the University of Pennsylvania.

My parents didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up. We were comfortable, but I didn't go to Oxbridge, and yet every American interviewer I get says to me, 'You're related to Charles II! Your grandfather was a baronet!' And it's infuriating, because that is a part of my history, but you're trying to turn me into a posh boy, and I'm not.

My family taught me radical politics from the beginning, but I also learned to prove myself in elite institutions.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

The attraction to me was that Harvard was such a big community, with interesting things to do and interesting people, but you realise when you're there that things are a lot narrower than you thought. It's a little bit of a let-down.