Steve Wynn Quotes

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

One of the nicest things about receiving the accolade of Australia is that, previously, the knighthood was historically for what was termed 'the establishment.' Now, this is an accolade for somebody who comes from a working-class background. Someone whose father was a truck driver and decided to buy a truck.

In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.

Mr. Lincoln's elevation shows that in America every station in life may be honorable; that there is no barrier against the humblest; but that merit, wherever it exists, has the opportunity to be known.

If education does not create a need for the best in life, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid caste society.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

I really do think the things that make our society what it is are under threat. It should be about everyone having the potential to be what they're going to be.

There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that's rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life

A meritocracy increases inequality --- by its very nature, it has to.

As the first generation of Chinese Communism passes, we are baffled by its unexpected successes

… in a republic where all are free and equal--prosperity and position constitute rank.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite's entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that 'merit' correlates with talents and deserts.

America is a meritocracy.

The term 'meritocracy' was coined by socialist theoretician Michael Young, who crafted the party's 1945 election manifesto.

Leaders are judged on merit and not on caste or family names.

We live in a time where it's very much in vogue, constant search for pure utopian equality, and which, on one level, is quite amusingly silly but also on another probably very important.

One of the things I'm so determined to preserve and restore is the fact that you can be the kid who was born in Dinsdale and find yourself working for the British government in the U.K., to being prime minister.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

Punishing achievement isn't gonna help anybody. Trying to equalize people by lowering the people at the top, that's not good. All that is is punitive. Why don't you find a way to elevate people at the bottom?