Elitist Culture Quotes

I don't think all music that is considered 'avant-garde' is bad, but it's definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.

If you wait until you're an adult to be exposed to the arts, it could seem elitist, it could seem out of reach, it could seem scary.

The Bostonians take their learning too sadly: culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their "Hub," as they call it, is the paradise of prigs.

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy.

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.

A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

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

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

I went to Queen's - a fine university with the proudly stupidest frosh week in the country. This was, when I was there, supposed to be somehow evidence of a higher social class.

This is college?' Schyler asked. 'or Downton Abbey?

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

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

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

It's a fairly common phenomenon of London life - people having fully developed critiques of books they haven't read and films they haven't seen. I'd probably include myself in that.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

The humanities don't belong to some elitist group... knowledge as a whole should be embraced.

Ballet is the repetitive training of the body for the purpose of executing steps in traditional fashion. It is tied to and bound by the past. It is a disciplined beauty consciously preserved in the image of the old days in societies that were class-conscious and appreciative of elitist physical expertise.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

For far too long the House of Commons has been run as little more than a private club by and for gentleman amateurs.

The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era's more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too.

I am very happy working for my European brands. My legacy isn't going to be a museum. Yet I would be very good at it. It's so painful. It's like everything - the same old guys - Herzog & de Meuron, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano - they don't pick original people.