Bob Rae Quotes

I am criticized for getting jobs because of my name, but I only use it when I have to.

Too often, people get jobs based on who they know - not what they know.

President Junior is the mascot of crony capitalism.

Affirmative action takes many forms in our society. White fraternity members help others with jobs.

Government posts are for sale, preventing some poor people with abilities from serving in those positions.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Hollywood is a boys' club, and that's something I thought was a stereotype - and it's not. That really shocked me. Still shocks me. Everyone's helping their buddies out and pressing their buddies and playing tennis with their buddies and making movies with their buddies, and that grosses me out.

I am offended by people who feel that they're entitled to something just because of their last name.

I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.

Nepotism is the bedrock of social existence.

The more rarefied a life you live, the easier it is to think that those who don't share it could be demonised. To find the common humanity becomes more of a struggle the more you surround yourself with nice things.

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.

That is the Roman way: to give favors to the favorites.

It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.

Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

In corporate levels, it's all about tailoring your shirt and which tennis club you belong to and which watch you are wearing and what did you shoot last week?

If there's one thing white men have never had a problem with in this clubby, white marble enclave of Washington, it's getting pulled up the ladder by other men.

Having been a head of state gives you the possibility of getting into places others can't go.

... the refusal of the military to become involved in the reforms, their allergy to anything new, their contempt for human dignity, their arrogance and self-satisfaction, their favoritism, personal whims, elitism.

Most of us pay some sort of price for screwing up. Quayle never has. His high school guidance counselor told him his grades were too low for admission to DePauw University, where his grandfather was a trustee and major donor, but he got in anyway. In college he flunked the departmental exam that was supposed to be a prerequisite to graduation, but he graduated anyway. Although it was 1969, the height of the Vietnam War, a year when more than a quarter million young men were drafted and other Indianans were being told it would take years to get into the National Guard, Quayle landed a spot in a week flat, after a retired Guard general who worked for his family made a call on his behalf. Quayle was rejected by Indiana University Law School, but he got in anyway- under an affirmative action program, after he visited the dean of admissions, a Republican judge in a city (Indianapolis) where Quayle’s grandfather owned the newspaper. (Soon thereafter, the grandfather made a large contribution to the law school.) Quayle was indifferent law student, but he got a job in the state attorney general’s office anyway. (His father made a few calls.) He was a twenty-nine year old employee of his father’s paper, but he got elected to Congress anyway, with the help of the paper and his own good looks. He was a poor congressman, but he got elected to Senate anyway, in the 1980 Reagan landslide. Two years later the DePauw faculty voted against giving him an honorary degree, but he got it anyway. He was a mediocre senator, but Bush put him on the national ticket anyway. He blew the debate, but he’ll probably be elected vice president anyway. At this rate he’ll be president by cherry blossom time.

To enjoy a prince's favor does not rule out the possibility of merit, but neither does it argue for its existence.

He’s on our side and that’s all that matters. Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.

Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority.

Art is the job of the privileged.