Elites Quotes

“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The common man already possesses the power they wished they had, they just don’t know it, and the powerful few do their best to keep that knowledge from them.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“You can’t dethrone a king if you don’t know they exist.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Earthlings, full of diversity, generally weren't hostile toward each other. The Earth was like a big insect jar. Insects put into a jar together tended not to fight unless the jar was agitated enough. If the jar owners put different types of ants in the same jar without agitating their habitat enough, they might just work together to overthrow the jar owners and build a happy society where everyone was equal and free. And we can't have that. Gotta keep shakin' that jar.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Humans who thought they were advancing around the chessboard of life as knights and bishops were actually among the multitude of pawns, advancing like fodder to their inevitable demise for the true kings residing behind the curtains, whose presence was invisible to virtually all the pieces on the chessboard.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Too much elite education renders a person unpractical. And tell you what? The highly educated people are further away from reality than the less educated ones. I would rather rely on the opinion of a less educated poor person who constantly deals with people, than an overly educated idiot who views this world only through an academic lens while sitting alone on his comfy couch.”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“We’ve learned that the most effective way at getting the sheep to willingly hand over their rights is to use a matter that’s life threatening. If they think their lives and their loved ones’ lives are in jeopardy, they’ll quickly agree to whatever we say. Even better than a virus outbreak is to make them think the whole planet will become inhabitable—a scenario where everyone would die. That’s why our Global Warming—which we changed to Climate Change—is our most important agenda. Instead of the reality of climate change being cyclical, of course, we make them think it’s humans’ fault and that way we can drastically mold their way of living to suit our needs. They’ll do whatever we tell them, give up all their rights and become completely dependent on us. Along with using technology for control, our Climate Change agenda is key.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“More elite the education, more disconnected the person is from reality.”
― Abhaidev, Notes from the Edge of Sanity

“Sports are about making the irrelevant so relevant that people forget what actually is.”
― Abhaidev, Notes from the Edge of Sanity

“The end justified the means, he told himself. The deceitful deeds left along the path leading to a clever man’s wealth were like a trail of bread crumbs. The crumbs would be quickly consumed by naïve birds and vermin, leaving the trail spotless, akin to a man grabbing abandoned, dirty money left on the street.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“I know where a lot of them [the elite or elitists] live.

Where's that?

Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there.”
― John McCain

“If one sees a handful of powerful and rich people at the pinnacle of opulence and fortune, while the crowd below grovels in obscurity and wretchedness, it is because the former valued the things they enjoy only because others are deprived of them and even without changing their condition, they would cease to rejoice if the people ceased to suffer.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“That's what powerful men did. Stayed quiet. Held secrets. Ran things from inside a tight protective circle, making perilous decisions only they were savvy enough to make, leaving normal morality to the mere earthlings, who lived and ate and died dully down below, never knowing the extent to which they were being shielded by a beneficent distant pulling of strings.”
― George Saunders, Vigil

“Many DEI officers/professionals I have spoken to over the years have confirmed to me that they don’t feel they have any power to change the structures of the workplaces in which they work. They are given just enough power – along with a fancy job title – to appear as though they are making changes, but once and if they dare to confront real problems, they are often replaced or disciplined by the privileged whites who remain at the top of every institution and organization.

[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“...while the troubles sweeping Europe and southern Britain comprised liberal and radical elements protesting against powerful elites to secure better rights, in Badenoch it was the opposite - a subtle exercise of power by a small but influential outsider elite seeking to sweep aside the long-established rights of the lower orders, whose mere presence disrupted their leisure pursuits. There was, of course, a measure of protest, but the scattered and impoverished nature of local communities rendered them powerless. Land-owners knew well enough which side their bread was buttered on - a trend that became increasingly evident over the next two decades.”
― David Taylor, 'The People Are Not There': The Transformation of Badenoch 1800 - 1863

“Yeah, I did not have DOGE being the center of the Trump administration before January 20, but it certainly has become the center. And, to me, it's revelatory. You get the richest guy in the world cutting off food for the starving children around the world. Like, that's the essence of what it is. The second thing it is, it's cruelty and ruthlessness. I have had so many conversations over the last couple of weeks with people inside federal agencies when the DOGE boys comes to count. And they are naked in their cruelty, that this agency disagrees with Donald Trump, people here, we don't like what you believe, and we're just getting rid of you. And so that cruelty is kind of naked. And, to me, it symbolizes something that is at the epitome of this administration. These DOGE people, Elon Musk, he went to Penn. The DOGE people went to Harvard, they went to Stanford, they worked at McKinsey. These are not populists. These are elitists. These are conservative microelites who've been in elite universities who play in the elite circles and they want to take it out on their fellow elites. And that's what this administration has become about, a battle between elites, not somebody representing the working class for problems that are real.”
― David Brooks

“Before discussing the 'relinking' of people and forests through community forestry, it is important to understand where the 'delinking' paradigm, superimposed onto Tanzania and elsewhere during colonial times originated. The separation of people and nature has deep-rooted conceptual origins, for example early Judeo-Christian texts explicitly framed humans as exceptional and separate from nature as opposed to many animist religions that placed humans within nature. The conceptual separation is particularly strong in Europe, as reflected in the origins of certain words, with the Latin word foestis originating from a meaning 'outside', as in a wild place outside human control.

Such 'wild places' later became the hunting reserves of elites in Europe in the form of exclusionary Royal Forests, 'commoners' were kept out. A few centuries later, during the period of Enlightenment and into industrialisation and urbanisation, livelihoods in countries like Britain are further delinked from nature, The division between [eople and nature has become so heavily engrained in modern industrialised society that 'wilderness' has attained a romantic idealisation.”
― Peter O'Hara, Reforesting Scotland 71, Spring/Summer 2025

“The Democracy of the Naïve”
There are still those naïve souls who talk of democracy— they even claim the future of democracy in this country or that is in danger…

As if democracy ever had a past or a present, and could therefore threaten its own future…
There was never democracy or justice, my friends; this world has always been—and will remain— ruled by the whims of elites and invisible hands that guide naïve publics to see the problems, desires, and agendas of the chosen few as noble causes worth struggle and revolution…

There is no democracy nor true revolution, my friends, except the silent ones that must unseat the elites who secretly push naïve publics to install or remove this government or that for their hidden interests…

What do you think, my friends? Do you still believe the future of democracy is in danger?”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“Death by Starvation or Boredom”
Many toil for scraps and cheap wages, surviving one fragile breath at a time— just one more breath...

While others, bloated with excess, labor only to escape boredom, pretending they’re saving a world drowning in the greed they created, and the power they refuse to let go.

The first walks a tightrope between breath and hunger. The second, cushioned by comfort, drifts closer to spiritual starvation, their soul numbed by excess.

And here lies the cruel symmetry— fate, with its blunt hands, levels the field by offering death either way: starvation... or boredom.

But the greatest tragedy belongs to those who die of both.”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“Because I work at places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and PBS, some people see me as a stand-in for the coastal elites, for the systems they believe have been crushing them down, and I get that. When those of us in positions of power in the establishment media and the larger cultural institutions of society tell stories that don’t include you, it is disorienting and disenfranchising. It is as if you look into society’s mirror and find that you are not there. People rightly get furious when that happens.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Anyway, because of Beezy’s patrician vibe and the fact that our parents grew up in a very horses-and-beeswax part of an already pretty aristocratic area of the state, you would have thought they were marked for success. You would have thought they couldn’t have avoided it! But well into their youth each of the five really did their utmost to scupper their own chances in life in utterly idiosyncratic ways, which is the usual province of the middle-to-upper-middle class. We didn’t realize this at the time, of course. To us, our parents were doing just fine.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds

“You don’t know they’ll be white. Maybe the Cloisters is full of Black people, and you’re the right person to knock on the door.”

I could hear a cross laugh in Keller’s quiet voice. “I’m pretty sure that the people who set up shop in a castle are going to be white. Museums: last refuge of the ruling class.”
― Eiren Caffall, All the Water in the World

“My major takeaway from Ron, now that I have a chance to reflect, is that getting a job is like gaining acceptance into an eighth-grade clique. There exists an elite consisting of people who hold jobs and have the power to confer that status on others, and my task is to penetrate this elite. Since my actual eighth-grade status never advanced beyond that of loathsome pariah and nerd, I have no practical experience of elite crashing, but it makes sense to include a ruthless scrutiny of the “product” I am trying to sell.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Boy, your father going to be one of those pipe-smoking, Wall Street Journal-reading motherfuckers, because I'm tired of being one of these bummy Raisin in the Sun niggers.”
― Paul Beatty, Tuff

“[What If?]
What if
the salaries of presidents
and military commanders
were equal
to what is paid
to the lowest-ranking soldiers?
Would we ever see
another war
on earth?

What if
a new law were passed:
that the defensive lines
in every war
must be made up
of the sons of the rich,
of princes,
kings,
and political leaders?
Would we ever see
a new war
again?

What if
the punishment
for saying I love you
without truly meaning it
were death?

How many lovers
would remain
in the world?

What if
all the dead
were granted the right
to return to life?

Would they truly agree
to come back?

And if they did,
would they die again—
of cerebral shock—
at what has become
of this ugly planet?

What if
every act we commit,
every word
we utter,
became international law?

What would we do?
What would we say?

Would we fall silent,
and cease all action
forever?

What if
the price of every word
I write
were a drop of blood
from my body?
What would I write,
and…

December 16, 2012”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“[The Democracy of the Naive]
There are still those naïve enough
to speak of democracy,
even to claim
that its future
in this country or that
is under threat,
as though democracy
had ever truly existed,
whether in the past
or the present,
and only now
faced an uncertain future.
There is no democracy,
my friends,
and there is no justice.
The world has always been,
and will remain,
ruled by the whims
of ruling classes
and unseen hands
that persuade the public
that the desires,
interests,
whims,
and agendas
of a chosen few
are noble causes,
worthy of struggle,
revolution,
and sacrifice
on the part
of the naïve
and the kindhearted.
There is no democracy,
my beloved friends,
and there is no revolution,
except the one
that must unfold in silence,
to remove
the hidden elites
who labor behind closed doors
to persuade
the naïve among us
to install one system
and overthrow another,
whenever their interests
require it.
So tell me,
my friends:
do you still believe
that the future of democracy
is in danger?

21/12/2022”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“[Dying of Hunger or of Boredom]

There are people
who work for wages
that barely keep hunger at bay,
granting them
a single additional gasp of life.
And there are others
who possess more than enough,
yet work for one reason only:
to kill boredom,
to feel that they are contributing something
to a world drowning
in their greed,
their hunger for power,
and their love of wealth.
The first remain
one step,
or less,
from dying of hunger.
The second,
often the very people
who pay the wages of the first,
remain a hair's breadth,
or less,
from dying of boredom.
Herein lies the paradox.
It is as though fate insists
on breaking down
every human barrier,
forcing everyone
to choose
between dying of hunger
and dying of boredom.
And woe
to those
who die of both.

28 January 2023”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“[The First Lady]

The First Lady is elegant,
impeccably dressed,
fashionable and refined.
And her esteemed husband,
the revered leader,
appears equally polished,
handsome in suit and tie.
You see her devoted
to charitable organizations,
scattering crumbs
to the poor
here and there.
And you see him
stealing the people's wealth
from every direction.
You see her present
at every charity gala
in support of the disabled.
And you see him
signing orders
to purchase more weapons,
or decrees that lead
to foreign wars
and civil wars alike,
producing ever more dead,
more prisoners,
and more disabled.
You see her
never missing an opportunity
to inaugurate a new center
for women's rights.
And you see him
in the company of clerics,
unceasing in his support
for venerable patriarchal institutions
whose sole purpose
is to marginalize
anyone who strays
from the filthy path
of male domination.
You see her donating generously
at every fundraiser
for children.
And you see him
signing decrees
to slash funding
for equal access
to education
and healthcare
for children
and their families.
In short,
the role of the First Lady
is to pretend
to repair
everything
her honorable husband
has broken.
Her role
is to offer us patience,
comfort,
and consolation
for the disasters,
the thefts,
and the crimes
of her distinguished husband
and his entourage.
And that is why
they are both thieves,
partners in the same enterprise,
united in the plunder
and destruction
of their people.
And this dirty game
will never end
until we create societies
conscious enough
to have no need
for the rule
of a First Gentleman,
and no need
for the performances
of false goodness
dispensed by the First Lady
drop by drop.

15 February 2023”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“[Missile]

A missile fell
near the heart of the city.
According to our correspondent,
its shrapnel killed
a widow
and a divorced woman.
The blast also struck
at least two people
from what are called
"minorities,"
and four others
who spoke languages
other than the country's
official one.
According to our correspondent,
the missile also killed
eight foreigners,
several homosexuals,
two prostitutes,
and two beggars.
It seems
that the only ones
who escaped its shrapnel
were those who classify people
under labels such as these.

19 July 2023”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]

“History is aristocratic gossip.”
― Meetali Kalia