“Upper Classes Are a Nation’s Past” – Ayn Rand

"After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ’abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit." George Orwell

"The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas in every epoch, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has at its disposal the means of material production has at the same time at its disposal the means of intellectual production, so that, on average, the thoughts of those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the ruling material conditions, the ruling material conditions conceived as ideas; that is, the conditions that make one class the ruling class, the ideas of its rule." Marx/Engels