The Rise of the Meritocracy Quotes

“Every selection of one is a rejection of the many.”

“Exceptional brains require exceptional teaching.....”

“....and here no lesson has been more simple, and yet more painful, to learn that the fact of genetic inequality.”

“If all went to orphanages, all would have equal opportunity, true, but at the cost of making everyone equally unhappy.”

“Wikipedia: The Rise of the Meritocracy”

“Indeed, the more riches a father bequeathed, the more often his children did nothing apart from the labour of spending their money.”

“Even if they had no property, parents wanted their children to find, if not the same job, then a slightly better job than themselves.”

“The private schools, less at home in the world of industry, technology, and science, gave too much attention to Athens and too little to the atom.”

“As men became more like machines, machines became more like men, and when machines were built to mimic people, the ventriloquist at last understood himself.”

“The schools would have failed to fulfil one of their essential purposes in a progressive class system; they would not have been society's escalators for the gifted.”

“Our grandfathers did not fully realize that promotion of adults on merit, with all that it implied for industrial organization, was as necessary as promotion of children on merit.”

“When the basic injustice was remedied, and the intelligent from every class were given their full opportunities, those who would have been enemies of the established order become its strongest defenders.”

“The top of today are breeding the top of tomorrow to a greater extent than at any time in the past. The elite is on the way to becoming hereditary; the principles of heredity and merit are coming together.”

“The classless society would also be the tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man.”

“The improvement of communications helped to root out such wickedness by advertising the standards of the wealthy and the glittering lives of thousands of people far beyond his own community to every child in the country.”

“We need ample holidays - history shows that scientists have often hit upon the missing link in a chain of thought quite unexpectedly when they were basthing in the sea, walking in the mountains or drowsing by the Caribbean.”

“There was no harm in the public schools imparting a superior education - it was all to the good; what was wrong was that the privileged were chosen by other criteria than merit. They were selected by their parents' bank accounts.”

“Today we frankly recognize that democracy can be no more than aspiration, and have rule not so much by the people as by the cleverest people; not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy* of talent.”

“One thing the regional centres could not do. They could not measure the qualities of character expressed in effort expended by an employee in the course of his work. Intelligence and effort together make up merit (I+E=M). The lazy genius is not one.”

“As members of a particular family, they want their children to have every privilege.  But at the same time they are opposed to privilege for anyone else’s children.  They desire equal opportunity for everyone else’s children, extra for their own.”