American Elite Quotes

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.

Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.

My family, we're all WASPs.

WASP

All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

A White House dinner is the American family assembled, from labor leaders to billionaires, actors, architects, academicians and athletes.

The Mark Birley fan club, of which epic American socialite Nan Kempner says she's the oldest living member, follows him doggedly.

I obviously did not volunteer to go to Afghanistan solely to protect the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s).

My friend Anderson Cooper is the scion of one of America's great shipping and railroad families, the Vanderbilts.