That’s paraphrasing a quote from William F. Buckley, Jr. The original quote from 1961 was, “I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty”. Buckley and others used variations of the quote throughout the years. The Boston part came from Buckley in 1963, “I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
It’s really a knock against Harvard while putting down government employees. Buckley went to Yale, hence the put down of Harvard. My variation is inclusive all the recruiting grounds of government employees - the high-level ones are Ivy and Colonial League types.
Notice that I amended the Boston part in the second sentence of my quote. Things were a lot different in the early 60’s in Boston when Buckley originally said this.