George Blagden Quotes

But the truth is the meritocracy is a lie. Those born into wealth and privilege will always be able to game the system for their own benefit and their children's own benefit.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

It's one of my biggest internal struggles - the whole schooling system in London and the fact that my kids are going to a posh school. It freaks me out.

Better educated than wealthy

It is not fair that some people should have a better chance in life simply because of where they live.

From the day I was born, there has always existed a huge disconnect between the stories often told by the elite and those I hear from ordinary people about our country although we live in the places; and witness the same events around us.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

The people who run the country have enormous influence over the culture, politics, and the economics of the country. And increasingly, they haven't a clue about how most of America lives. They have never experienced it.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

There's a two-tier justice system. And anyone who denies it is either naive or in denial. This is what the reality of America is. If you have certain privileges, if you're from a certain socioeconomic status, you have a certain skin color, the odds are in your favor.

There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren't.

Private schools are gaming the system. There is way too much state money going in, and people who go to private schools seem to be given a head start for all of the top jobs and that's something that needs to be dealt with as well.

Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

No harm is done by the possession of Luxury by some people if only at the same time EVERYBODY HAS ENOUGH. The wrong incurred by the rich toward the poor lies solely in the fact that while they revel, the poor starve

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

Art is the job of the privileged.

The elite denizens of Washington and Wall Street scorn and mock the good and decent people of this country for wanting their laws enforced and their communities protected.

I think that the elites have lived too long among themselves.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap.

There's a lot of freedom to do anything you want in Mexico. It's just that that freedom belongs to a few. It's a huge country with a big contrast. There is this big inequality, so those like us that have the chance to do things, we know we are very lucky.

All of us kids in the neighbourhood had to go shoeless for the same reason - all except the landlord's son, because his father had more income.