I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live.Where’s that?Well, in our nation’s capital and New York City. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived there.

No,” Foyle roared. “Let them hear this. Let them hear everything.””You’re insane, man. You’ve handed a loaded gun to children.””Stop treating them like children and they’ll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?””What are you talking about?””Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all...

The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won’t find it because it is beneath them.

I Am In Love With Myself, With My Heart.

Two principles have stood face-to-face from the beginning of time; and they will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.

…I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a...

If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts.

The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity’s tendency toward “an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.

They’re so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretensions which the hopes and fears of the age render most potent.

There are some among the so-called elite who are overbearing and arrogant. I want to foster leaders, not elitists.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around...

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

I love pop culture — the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That’s why I said I don’t like elitism.

They loved their country largely because they controlled it.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

She’s on the stairs, ma’am, getting her breath,’ said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That’s the only way to get really good ones. And they’re the rarest of luxuries.

What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed?

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

priestly” aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.

Rich or poor, money rules with an iron fist.

The problem with call-in shows is quite simple, if you only dare to admit it: Democracy is best when not everyone can be heard all the time. If we are constantly reminded of all the stupid things that people say and think, it becomes rather difficult to remember the good and noble arguments for everyone...

To knock today’s prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday’s prestige dialects.

What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always,whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extremethat it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases tobe such when it ceases to be aristocratic