Meritocracy Myth Quotes

You don't have enough talent to win on talent alone.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Getting or not getting the job isn't an indicator of your abilities. You're going to get jobs when you think you sucked, and you're not going to get jobs when you think you rocked.

And look, we have young people in this country who are thirty years old living with their parents. We have young people in this country who don't have jobs, who graduate from college and are fed the lie of meritocracy. "You get a degree, you get a job." That's not happening. We have young people who have become the Zero Generation: zero hope, zero employment, zero possibilities. Do we really believe that this young generation is going to stand by and not take note of an economic system that - however it calls itself - has completely betrayed them?

Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.

Nobody can tell me that if players are good enough, they will come through. That is not true. There are plenty of players who are good enough.

The big lie is that the people who make a lot of money were the only ones that worked hard.

There is an incompatibility between being glamorous, young and a woman and using my brain. The official version is there is no discrimination, and talent dominates, but that is not the case.

This deluded little rube who really thought the future would be any better. If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something.