Thomas Elyot Quotes

I felt I was moving among two groups [literary intellectuals and scientists] comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington Hom or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

We are living in the jet-age, but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

It's just unconscionable that America has become so stupid.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

True conservatives fear anything that is at odds with the status quo, even to the extent of being unable to recognise when the status quo represents injustice. And reactionary conservatives actually want to tear down the gains of the past.

Champagne Socialist

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

The cause of mutual fear consists partly in the natural equality of men

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

Society is a partnership not only by those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

When English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it… They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities

In every country, and under every government, particular men may be too rich.

It really does matter what my neighbor’s lot in life is.

The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.

… one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

The poor and ignorant will continue to lie and steal as long as the rich and educated show them how.

When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.

One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.

The task ahead of us will be extremely challenging as the Tory party continue with their austerity agenda and as we continue to resolve the issues of the past and build unity, reconciliation, and equality.

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

Of course, it's absurd that we trust the Tories with our day-to-day reality, as so many of them don't really inhabit it. Why elect people to run our schools and hospitals who choose not to go to those schools and hospitals?