Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

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.

The Honours List is accused of being too top heavy, rewarding those born with a silver spoon in their mouth - as if hereditary titles and accidents of birth are incompatible with democracy. But if you stop to think about it, what is more democratic than nature?

We remain a country where a young person's chance of fulfilling their potential rests on the vagaries of where they were born and what their parents do, rather than their innate talent and ambition.

The truth is, I feel sorry for the Old Etonians. Everybody should be judged on his or her own merits. Assuming that toffs are 'out of touch' is more modern and fashionable than assuming they have a 'natural fitness for government,' but it's no fairer.

Growing up in Middlesbrough I was taught to be resilient and competitive. My teachers made us believe that just because kids were at private school up the road, it didn't mean they were better than us.

I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

But at the end of the day, the lottery of birth shouldn't determine your value to the world.

I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

Here's something we're rarely told growing up: our world rewards wealth, not hard work or talent.

I believe in free education, free healthcare. But I do not believe in equality.

[C]lass consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite-the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moronrun through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron.

Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on. All it needs to get the poor people out of poverty for us to create an enabling environment for them. Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

The division is based on knowledge, based on qualifications - but as I learned from the factionless, a system that relies on a group of uneducated people to do its dirty work without giving them a way to rise is hardly fair.

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

For a society as abundant and as blessed as ours, to have as many disadvantaged children as we have does not bode well for our long-term economic future.

I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain't necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.