Elitist Views Quotes

No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has any one ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.

Blogs are for anoraks who couldn't get published any other way.

The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.

Whoever is ignorant is vulgar.

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.

I was raised to think that rock was music for ignorant people who didn't think for themselves.

I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

I don't mind what the market is, but why is it vapid? If they're such a bunch of idiots, why don't you show them good music instead? They're not going to know the difference.

I hate those earnest TV documentaries that are the world according to people with glasses who know better than you.

There's a segment of this world, there's a mind state that's permeated the intellectual consciousness of this world that comes from a certain type of people that looks at me and you and your average individual as a problem - like a blight on an otherwise potential paradise, something that needs to be cured.

Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He's a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn't as smart as he thinks he is.

What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.

My tastes in all things lean towards the arty and boring. I like sports documentaries about Scrabble players, bands that play quiet, unassuming music, and TV shows that win awards. In that way, I am an elitist snob.

I'm not an elitist. I hate the fashion industry sometimes because it becomes so focused on the elite.

Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

There are a lot of people in this country who really like my writing. And a lot of writers respect me. But the so-called establishment? They hate me.

That's a very hard thing to help the establishment know. We're still an establishment that thinks the average mentality is something like 13 years of age, that never forgot H.L. Mencken's notion that nobody lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. That's the horseshit the establishment has always lived with.

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things.

I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.

The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati.

Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion--religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her.