In Defense of Elitism Quotes

“In most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding…they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there. Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“We don’t need the people in Miami to code. We don’t need them to become elite. Or even like the elite. We simply need them to believe in the necessity of our expertise. We need to show what a disaster it would be if I switched places with any of the people at this conference. One of the most dangerous populist ideas—the one proposed by people like Jerry and Judge Rick Tennant—is that politicians don’t need any experience. That guts and common sense are all it takes. I’m the perfect person to disprove that theory. I have some guts. I have some common sense. And I definitely have no experience.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Narcissism has been destroying truth.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“affiliation. I wouldn’t get into Stanford if I applied today. Not only because it would be creepy to have a forty-seven-year-old dude in your frosh dorm, but also because the vast array of people I’d be competing against would make my excellent work as vice president of my Model United Nations club seem less impressive. Elitism was so un-meritocratic in the 1960s that the University of Pennsylvania accepted Donald Trump.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“To write off white working class anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food.” It’s”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“History is a graveyard of elites.” According to his theory, there will always be an elite and, as the Pareto principle states, they’ll always make up 20 percent of the population and have 80 percent of the wealth.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Being disempowered is the fuel for conspiracy theories.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“The Internet is the opposite of novels: it’s an empathy-reducing machine.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“If you don’t see stories that are relevant to yourself on the Washington Post, you might wind up on Breitbart,”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Peter Navarro, the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, said about working for Trump, “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Arendt wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Instead of deserting leaders who had lied to them, they would protest they had all known all along the statement was a lie and admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Scott’s”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“objectives. And it takes you a long time to get good at it.” Trump, he says, is steering a truck without a commercial driver’s license, and we’re all crammed into the trailer. Also, he’s not looking at the road because he’s on his phone tweeting.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“White people who stayed in their hometown were 50 percent more likely to vote for Trump than whites who moved even two hours away.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.…Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen: the gut.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“A 2017 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 48 percent of Republicans thought there was “a lot of discrimination” against Christians, while only 27 percent of them thought there was “a lot of discrimination” against black people; 43 percent thought there was a lot of discrimination against whites.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Only about half of Americans now think colleges do any good, and more than half of Republicans say they have a negative effect on society.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“This is what I didn’t know how to tell Cassandra: we Americans have nowhere to go. We have to save the elite.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“Elites feel the same way about college as non-elites do about church.”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book

“More than 90 percent of whites with postgraduate degrees who voted for Hillary Clinton believe it’s “racist for a white person to want less immigration to help maintain the white share of the population,” while only 45 percent of minority voters feel that way. More than 80 percent of white people who voted for Hillary Clinton think diversity makes America stronger, while only 54 percent of black voters agree”
― Joel Stein, In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book