Jean de la Bruyere Quotes

'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.

Let Socialists make the laws today and they would break them tomorrow. No sooner do the poor become rich than they harden their hearts to the miseries of the poor. In so far as it proposes to correct the evils of unequal fortune, Socialism aims to repeal the laws of nature.

There is no question that in the next thirty or forty years a Negro can achieve the position ... of President of the United States.

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed and decisively so.

Under the old social regime, social position had been absolute: born a peasant, died a peasant; born a chieftain, died a chieftain. In the new world, everything was relative. The only real measure of a man’s worth was money — and the accumulation of money has no intrinsic limits.

The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom... have been thrust out of all public employment... a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.

In future we'll have a different type of rich and poor.

'The Sound of Silk' will serve as a lens for larger questions about cultural identity in a global society and the potential for individuals to act as catalysts for change.

As one of the grammar-school generation, I grew up as part of a postwar meritocracy that steadily infiltrated the citadels of power.

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.

We don't want to tell young girls and boys that the odds are stacked against them from the start. Instead, we could tell them that with passion, conviction, and determination we can build a better future. This future is possible by redesigning our economy to truly reward hard work rather than wealth.

The Labour party is not perfect but I have seen in my own life how it is the greatest vehicle for positive hopeful social change.

The rich do not want people who come from poor families to rise to the highest position in the country.

I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.

There are lots of great educationalists out there who really care about social mobility.

Britain's great postwar meritocratic experiment was broad-based, but it was in politics that the change was most dramatic.

Our country was not built to support blood dynasties or to elevate the rich and famous to a higher ethical or constitutional plain.

If the traditional British elite had made a great success of running my country, as successful, say, as the elites of Germany, Japan and America, then maybe it would be a club worth joining.

If we genuinely believe in a bigger future for our country, we have to redistribute both wealth and power - so people can take back control for good, not just for one vote.

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

Kaaka Muttai' is the expression of an insider. It is a film about globalisation and its effects.

To be English and long secretly for Prince Philip's heyday is, at least partly, to be wistful for a fairer, more meritocratic land where jobs were for life and social mobility was real.

The status quo is never happy when things become a meritocracy.

I am the typical British aspiring working class. To be called 'elite' by people who have inherited wealth and run hedge funds or worked in the City of London, I don't criticise them for it, but the idea is frankly laughable. Just ridiculous.

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.