Elite Knowledge Quotes

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.

There is a sect in this country, which extends its influence, more or less, into all the ramifications of society, that explodes all kinds of knowledge not founded on personal experience; which inculcates that ignorance is the summum bonum; that the less one reads the more one thinks, and that the less he understands, the better he can act; that education beyond the precincts of common schools is allied to aristocracy, and incompatible with natural equality

Truth is for the minority.

The public does not know what is possible. We do.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

Class division in knowledge goes deeper than any other class division.

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.

We should speak as the populace, think as the learned.

It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.

It turns out the businessman knows more about how the economy really works than the chattering class. What a shock.