Hierarchy Quotes

“Part of the hem floated loose. She spun around again—the fabric tightened like wool on a spindle. She breathed in fear. The boat was farther away. She swung her head around—so was the shore.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Temples are for the gods,” Thucydides said. “No city has the hubris to put her own citizens on a temple.” Phidias promised, “The Athenians will look like gods.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Aplongeuris a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Von Trotha said, “The Wahehe are a tribe of about one quarter of a million people! On the 17th of August 1891, they defeated the German expedition against them which was led by Zeleski.”
― Michael G. Kramer, His Forefathers and Mick

“The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do...”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“Collaboration has no hierarchy. The Sun collaborates with soil to bring flowers on the earth.”
― Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step

“Our economic order is tightly woven around the exploitation of animals, and while it may seem easy to dismiss concern about animals as the soft-headed mental masturbation of people who really don't understand oppression and the depths of actual human misery, I hope to get you to think differently about suffering and pain, to convince you that animals matter, and to argue that anyone serious about ending domination and hierarchy needs to think critically about bringing animals into consideration.”
― Bob Torres, Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights

“Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.”
― Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism

“There is a higher form of hierarchy and that is the hierarchy of the spirit. When I stand in front of a person, I stand in front of a soul and I have met magnificent souls in bodies possessing no money, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies bathed in riches. In the same light, I have met magnificent souls in bodies bathed in wealth, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies that are impoverished. I am tired of people busying their minds with hierarchy based upon money, because this form of hierarchy is primitive; meanwhile there is an altogether higher form of hierarchy that is of the soul. As you judge man and woman based upon their riches, I laugh at your primitive form of judgment! When I stand in front of a human, I stand in front of a soul.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Unfortunately, in a hierarchical structure, power relationships tend to determine the content; there is always the danger that a" rank-based "logic will prevail. Managers, intent on advancement, tend to supply the information they know their superiors want to hear, rather than the information they ought to hear. Large organizations tend, therefore, to become systematically stupid.”
― John Médaille

“Certainly, a clear line must be preserved by strict discipline, and on the other hand the men must know that everything is done for them that hard times permit. On the top of that it follows that, among real men, what counts is deeds, not words; and then it comes of itself, when such are the relations between men and their leaders, that instead of opposition there is harmony between them. The leader is merely a clearer expression of the common will and an example of life and death. And there is no science in all this. It is a practical quality, the simple manly commonsense that is native to a sound and vigorous race.”
― Ernst Jünger, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918

“Would you have wished more, or fewer, anarchists around in the Thousand Year Reich or any of the other fantasies of hierarchy?”
― Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

“The Gray soldiers prowl the cities ensuring order, ensuring obedience to the hierarchy. The Whites arbitrate their justice and push their philosophy. Pinks pleasure and serve in highColor homes. Silvers count and manipulate currency and logistics. Yellows study the medicines and sciences. Greens develop technology. Blues navigate the stars. Coppers run the beauracracy. Every Color has a purpose. Every Color props up the Golds.”
― Pierce Brown, Red Rising

“What is the bottom line for the animal/human hierarchy? I think it is at the animate/inanimate line, and Carol Adams and others are close to it: we eat them. This is what humans want from animals and largely why and how they are most harmed. We make them dead so we can live. We make our bodies out of their bodies. Their inanimate becomes our animate. We justify it as necessary, but it is not. We do it because we want to, we enjoy it, and we can. We say they eat each other, too, which they do. But this does not exonerate us; it only makes us animal rather than human, the distinguishing methodology abandoned when its conclusions are inconvenient or unpleasant. The place to look for this bottom line is the farm, the stockyard, the slaughterhouse. I have yet to see one run by a nonhuman animal.”
― Catherine A. MacKinnon

“Most ecofeminists reject dichotomies and hierarchies as alien to the natural world – nature is interconnections.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“I don't want people to think I mind being mistaken for African American. I don't. There are, however, many African immigrants in America who, to climb the social ladder, resist being categorized, by white people, with African Americans. Some even go so far as to claim superiority. This is not surprising. In America, the racial hierarchy has white at the top and black on the bottom. *We're not that kind of black,* I have heard a member of my own family--an uncle-- argue when a white person leveled a racism insult against him. Given this, is is also not surprising that there exists some animosity between the African immigrant and African-American communities.”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“We are the same, you and I. Whether samurai or night-hawk, the Suruga Dainagon or member of the Toudouza, it makes no difference. My sword is the proof...."

These words, wrung from the very depths of his soul, surprised even Seigen himself. He had not risen in the world merely in order to satisfy his ambition, but in order to repudiate hierarchical society and the fixed class system.”
― Takayuki Yamaguchi, シグルイ 15

“Despotic tendencies in human beings are so deeply ingrained that they cannot simply be renounced. We did not just suddenly go from nasty to nice. Reverse dominance hierarchy is a form of dominance; egalitarianism is not simply the absence of despotism; it is the active and continuous elimination of potential despotism.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“It’s ironic however that God would give you such a low threshold for pain when what you do is slay the demonic soldiers of the army of darkness.”
― The Alpha Jan

“We did not come from nowhere. We are embedded in a very deep biological and cosmological history. That history does not determine us, because organisms from the very beginning, and increasingly with each new capacity, have influenced their own fate.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“We may not like to think of it when we say -it is more blessed to give than to receive-, but it is the giving that creates dominance. As Marcel Mauss reminds us: - To give is to show one’s superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister. – The archetypal minister is the child, who cannot repay what he or she receives, at least not until much later if ever. Thus, if nurturance is linked to dominance, receiving is linked to submission. These elementary facts of human life must surely be kept in mind as we consider the relation between gods and men, rulers and people, in hierarchical societies.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“If the disposition to dominate and the disposition to nurture are part of our biological heritage, they have been partially transformed by culture.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there. ( "A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It’s Bad for You", Aeon)”
― Clifton Mark

“Suddenly she was blinking hard. To cry now would be catastrophic—and yet the disappointment of it all weighed heavily on her shoulders. Because there was always a part of her—despite her understanding, cultivated over years of such disappointments, of where she would fall in any social hierarchy—there was always a part of her that hoped that this time would be different. That some graceful, lissome boy or girl would have the patience and acuity to pick Tracy out of a crowd, take notice of one of the positive qualities that she infrequently allowed herself to number: her sense of humor, or her drawing ability, or her singing voice, or her loyalty, her devotion to anyone who showed her even a modicum of interest.”
― Liz Moore

“The chimerical prejudice of 'equality' foes against all the best established facts, in the intellectual order as well as in the physical order; it is the negation of all natural hierarchy, and it is the debasement of all knowledge to the level of the limited understanding of the masses.”
― René Guénon, East and West