Privileged Elite Quotes

If work were good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor.

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few.

When only a minority consisting of capitalists can enjoy the good life, while the majority of workers must endure hardship, they will naturally not be able to live together in peace and harmony.

There’s a mal-distribution in wealth in this country. Entitlements end up going to the rich anyway. Some of them should be attacked. The ones who rip us off, the ones who get bailed out.

Critics say the OWS protesters hate the rich. Come on! Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning - they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

Damned, damned be the rich! May not even their fingernails be left!... I'm sure that they are going to Hell head-first.

Look around. Oil companies guzzle down the billions in profits. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and Wall Street CEOs, the same ones the direct our economy and destroyed millions of jobs still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Does anyone here have a problem with that?

The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.

The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan - it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

The kind of capitalism I hate most is crony capitalism, the friends who decide. These are things which should be killed in Russia.

I mean, you just go down the line, and with any of these issues, it's about rich people staying rich. And using poverty as a weapon against people. That's what we see every day. And I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to the nuances of it, but just common sense tells me the whole thing is corrupt.

If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail, we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout.

How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.

It is simply that America is very rich and very powerful and generally speaking everybody hates the rich and the powerful.

It's that Romney is taking advantage of the government's 'free stuff,' too, and has been profiting from it handsomely for a long, long time - even as he rails about the 'free stuff' that the government provides other people.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

Washington is broken. Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached while leaving middle class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill. Protecting insurance company profits instead of patients and lowering health costs.

…those are called gentlemen who live idly in abundance from the returns of their possessions without having any care either for cultivation or for other necessary trouble in living. Such are pernicious in every republic and in every province, but more pernicious are those who, beyond the aforesaid fortunes, command from a castle and have subjects to obey them.