The Rise of the Meritocracy Quotes

“Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“The last century has witnessed a far-reaching redistribution of ability between the classes in society, and the consequence is that the lower classes no longer have the power to make revolt effective. Without intelligence in their heads, the lower classes are never more menacing than a rabble, even if they are sometimes sullen, sometimes mercurial, not yet completely predictable.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“The dangerous exception is the politician so stupid or so vain that he does not even recognize his own incompetence.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“In effecting vital psychological change - making discipline voluntary by putting a goad inside the mind socialism has played an indispensable part. In the beginning there was protestantism. As Weber and Tawney showed long ago, the function of protestantism was to fire the acquisitive urge. The successful adaptation of religion to economic requirements was what made expansion possible in Western Europe and the parts of the world which once formed part of the British Empire. The failure of older religions elsewhere to supply the fuel was likewise the reason for the emergence of the new and linked religions of communism and nationalism.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“The protests of the past were the protests of youth. By rebelling against conventions and restrictions imposed on them by their elders, they at last made a new world. They dethroned the old and made youth the prince of industry. Let us praise them all.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“Some cried destruction on the established order, some tried, more constructively, to remove the blocks to their own advancement. The most rebellious knew instinctively that the fastest progress occurs anywhere when the old have to surrender their power before their span of life is complete - the essence of every social revolution is the earlier transfer of authority from one generation to another; the wisest knew that the surest progress is made by the mouse, by nibbling at the establishment instead of by taking arms against it.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“Is not the moral obvious, that the battle for production will be won on the playing-fields of the common schools?”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“International competition between economies was also competition between schools.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“Every human being would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure, but to develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“The classless society would also be the tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“Educational injustice enabled people to preserve their illusions, inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“by imperceptible degrees an aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of talent.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“They assumed that some men were better than others, and only waited to be told in what respect.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy

“The highest fulfilment lies in submission.”
― Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy