Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes

Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.

Washington has become this place that people don't leave. It has become this permanent feudal class.

No country can exist without a ruling class. The governing class in a America is a rank that is for sale.

Our hotel was full of legislators and volunteer officers, mostly planters or sons of planters, and almost without exception men of standing and property. South Carolina is an oligarchy in spirit, and allows no plebeians in high places.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

I intended to be one of the governing class.

Chile is still at the whim of powerful, traditional elites who sit as a higher societal authority than the elected government.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy: every field of human endeavor, every kind of organization, will always be led by a relatively small elite.

Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re-sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

The worst country I ever lived in, the old U.S.S.R., was crammed with privileges for the political elite. They had their own hospital, their own shops, country houses, and blocks of flats, special lanes on the streets so they could bypass the traffic in their special cars.

Lyall had spent centuries nibbling about the great layered cake that was polite society while Lord Akeldama acted the part of the frosting on its top.

There are still Negro elites. Many of them are obviously much richer, and perhaps a little more integrated into what remains a white power structure. But those old rituals from the social clubs, to the broadly segregated white and black schools, to an obsessive interest in ancestry, all of that does still exist. Look: we are a class-bound society.

There are two Americas: Washington and the rest of us.

People in power make the path to power. It means that we will always get the same system, and it's one that is not necessarily in the interest of people's lives.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

Because my business partner, Mitt Romney, was running for president when 'Unintended Consequences' was published, the media held up my book as a defense of the 1 percent.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

What makes you the establishment is if you buy into it.

I do have strong feelings about the aristocracy: they serve a purpose, but it's a sort of insular strand of society.

We have a wider political and economic system in which ancient, landed power still carries immense weight. There is nothing some landowners would like more than to set the police on those who dare to venture into their vast estates.