Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Where but in America could a European thinker convinced of the elite nature of genuine education produce pupils who would go on to make common cause with populist politicians?

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

I've never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.

The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

In the West, it's just a given that art exists in this high-class place. But in Japan, there's no high class. The minute you come out, you're low class.

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.

We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism.

I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.

I really disliked Philadelphia society - really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.

If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'

I think that in the past there has been a kind of cultural resistance to Latin because it's associated with elitism.

The people's love of pumpkin spice and snobbish elites' derision of it suggest a subtle political reality: the pumpkin spice latte is America's most conservative drink.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us.

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.

Inverted snobbery is just as dangerous as snobbery itself, you know - that pride in having nothing.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

I want to break down the wall of, you know, you have to put on a jacket and tie, and you have to act a certain way, and you have to know how to order the right kind of wine. All these things have suddenly been built up around jazz and the way it's presented.