Meritocracy Quotes

“The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune.”
― Max Weber

“Narratives of racial exceptionality obscure the reality of ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing ideologies of individualism and meritocracy. They also do whites a disservice by obscuring the white allies behind the scenes who worked hard and long to open the field. These allies could serve as much-needed role models for other whites.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it.”
― Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“They should live all together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit of worthy acts, their one measure of difference between man and man.”
― Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume I

“If a criminal becomes a politician, it's the fault of the citizens, not the system, and if a system keeps failing to oust the criminals from politics, that too is the fault of the citizens.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“It's not your status as an orogene that bothers them. It's that you haven't yet proven yourself.

(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“I must at this point reiterate my strong objection to being asked to fill in forms in which I have to tick a box labelling my 'race' or 'ethnicity', and voice my strong support for Lewontin's statement that racial classification can be actively destructive of social and human relations - especially when people use racial classification as a way of treating people differently, whether through negative or positive discrimination. To tie a racial label to somebody is informative in the sense that it tells you more than one thing about them. It might reduce your uncertainty about the colour of their hair, the colour of their skin, the straightness of their hair, the shape of their eye, the shape of their nose and how tall they are. But there is no reason to suppose that it tells you anything about how well-qualified they are for a job. And even in the unlikely event that it did reduce your statistical uncertainty about their likely suitability for some particular job, it would still be wicked to use racial labels as a basis for discrimination when hiring somebody. Choose on the basis of ability, and if, having done so, you end up with an all-black sprinting team, so be it. You have not practised racial discrimination in arriving at this conclusion”
― Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“I must at this point reiterate my strong objection to being asked to fill in forms in which I have to tick a box labelling my 'race' or 'ethnicity', and voice my strong support for Lewontin's statement that racial classification can be actively destructive of social and human relations - especially when people use racial classification as a way of treating people differently, whether through negative or positive discrimination. To tie a racial label to somebody is informative in the sense that it tells you more than one thing about them. It might reduce your uncertainty about the colour of their hair, the colour of their skin, the straightness of their hair, the shape of their eye, the shape of their nose and how tall they are. But there is no reason to suppose that it tells you anything about how well-qualified they are for a job. And even in the unlikely event that it did reduce your statistical uncertainty about their likely suitability for some particular job, it would still be wicked to use racial labels as a basis for discrimination when hiring somebody. Choose on the basis of ability, and if, having done so, you end up with an all-black sprinting team, so be it. You have not practised racial discrimination in arriving at this conclusion... Discriminating against individuals purely on the basis of a group to which they belong is, I am inclined to think, always evil. There is near-universal agreement today that the apartheid laws of South Africa were evil. Positive discrimination in favour of 'minority' students on American campuses can fairly, in my opinion, be attacked on the same grounds as apartheid. Both treat people as representative of groups rather than as individuals in their own right. Positive discrimination is sometimes justified as redressing centuries of injustice. But how can it be just to pay back a single individual today for the wrongs done by long-dead members of a plural group to which he belongs?”
― Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible….Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

“You're lucky you chose Houston. It's a true meritocracy here. I'm from Dallas, which is more closed. Houston is wide open. Here, you work hard, you succeed. It doesn't matter who your parents or grandparents were. Nearly all doors are open. If one isn't, you build your own door and march right through it.”
― Marc Grossberg, The Best People: A Tale of Trials and Errors

“Men with merit need to be rewarded, but men without merit need not be insulted.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American. That is what we do.”
― Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays

“The third serious problem the culture of customer service as we know it creates is turning every profession into a customer service tool to generate profits. In doing so, we risk the loss of creativity, quality, and critical thinking in many walks of life. Nowhere is this risk clearer and more damaging than viewing students at different educational institutions as customers, and nowhere this trend has been happening more rapidly than at schools, colleges, and universities, especially at private institutions. There is severe damage done to creativity and critical thinking when all students want is an A, and in fact feel entitled to get it since they (or their parents) are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend elite schools. Many educators are under enormous pressure to give students grades they do not deserve in order to avoid receiving bad student evaluations (or to ensure getting good ones). This pressure is intensifying as academic jobs become increasingly contingent and precarious, where teaching staff are hired under short contracts only renewed based on so-called ‘performance,’ which is often measured by student evaluations and enrollment. When this happens, academic and intellectual compromises and corruption increase. Colleagues at elite American universities have been pressured to give students grades no lower than a B, with the explanation that this is what is ‘expected.’ Rampant grade inflation is unethical and unacceptable. Unfortunately, when graduate instructors resist professors’ instructions to fix grades by grading according to independent criteria of intellectual merit, they may be verbally chastised or worse, fired. This humiliation not only reinforces the norm of inflating grades, it also bolsters the power of the tenured professors who instruct their teaching assistants to do it.”
― Louis Yako

“Our aim should be to eliminate politics altogether, but in the meantime, we must continue to humanize the democracy of today by empowering the good politicians and methodically placing political power only in the hands of the capable through proper training and licensing, like in medical practice, and not through random selection and election of candidates.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“Peace is a state of mind, but in a world where the state controls the mind, peace remains an inconvenience.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“Meritocracy is a social arrangement like any other: it is a loose set of rules that can be adapted in order to obscure advantages, all the while justifying them on the basis of collective values.”
― Shamus Rahman Khan, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School

“The search for better, for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants, was never more vigorous than it is now. And more than ever before is the demand for competent men in excess of the supply.

What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom some one else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency.

In the past the prevailing idea has been well expressed in the saying that “Captains of industry are born, not made”; and the theory has been that if one could get the right man, methods could be safely left to him. In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.”
― Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management

“The problem with creating a political party is that, by the time you finish creating it, you forget why you created it in the first place. Then slogans replace action and manifestos replace motion. So, forget parties and take action to solve the issues of your society. Come together for a common cause, seek out a leader of merit and character, then act together. And when enough regions of a nation have enough non-partisan, acting leaders of merit and character, the entire democracy of that nation is bound to turn meritocratic. Then only will we witness the rise of true democracy - a democracy free from political authoritarianism - a democracy of the people, by the people, for the people.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“Come together for a common cause, seek out a leader of merit and character, then act together. And when enough regions of a nation have enough non-partisan, acting leaders of merit and character, the entire democracy of that nation is bound to turn meritocratic.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“In order to build a truly civilized society, we need, not democratic government, but meritocratic government.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“Our predecessors around the world in the path of service and reform, made a huge progress by establishing democracy as a civilized alternative to the primitive practice of dictatorship. Now, we stand at yet another crossroads of societal progress, where we must replace our current merit-less and childish democracy with the civilized alternative of meritocratic democracy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders

“The four greatest threats to humanity are fundamentalism, nationalism, transhumanism and democracy.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“True merit is like steel and not like cotton, it seems small from outside but weighs heavy inside.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school's desk you'll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food.”
― Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“If an immigrant's daughter can become the vice-president of our United States, then the day is not far that even an immigrant can become the president - of course it'll require further amendments to the constitution, but that day our sweet land of liberty will truly be an advanced nation on earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“We can take the revolutionary leap from democracy to meritocracy right now - dissolve the government and all political offices, and keep the departments that actually run a nation anyways.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“Dictatorship is rule of the cunning, democracy is rule of the halfwits. Both are quite degrading for society, cause neither of them is born of merits.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“The first principle of social development is, authority doesn't solve a problem, expertise guided by character does.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“Meritocracy is the fulfillment of democracy, not the destruction of it.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto

“We cannot create a truly democratic society till we create a stateless society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto