Quotes About Status

The only difference between a pirate and a peer is who you divide the spoils with.

politics is nothing more than a rich man's hobby.

A considerable amount of American consumption spending is not for the enjoyment of consumption per se, but to show off wealth, status, or sexual allure. In the famous phrase of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen, this is "conspicuous consumption," that is, consumption whose main purpose is to impress others rather than to be enjoyed by oneself.2

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

He always appreciated expensive things, as if consuming them would make him valuable.

Ser pobre é detalhe sem importância. Ser conhecido por ser pobre é que dói.

What else matters but pedigree and rumor, my lord? Those things make the world go around.

How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.

If you Find A Wife, they say, your Favorability Rating will improve, because although you are neck and neck with Nancy Fucking Beavers, a middle-aged woman with an ass like two neighborly cast-iron skillets who wears those unbelievable pantsuits — Nancy Fucking Beavers is not fucking single.

I just got my work visa to shoot American Horror Story, and my official status is "alien with extraordinary abilities."

Your net worth determines how valuable you are in the sight of men

Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened - as if somebody was trying to demote them.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Even actresses that you really admire, like Reese Witherspoon, you think, 'Another romantic comedy?' You see her in something like 'Walk the Line' and think, 'God, you're so great!' And then you think, 'Why is she doing these stupid romantic comedies?' But of course, it's for money and status.

A deep river of must-have school mania runs through the chattering classes. There is, of course, the parental adrenaline rush at suburban cocktail parties that comes from announcing one's son or daughter as an Ivy Leaguer.

Americans at the top have become the experts in countersignaling, because they don't feel they have to impress anyone. Everything is now casual, because the new aristocracy of talent enforces all the conformity that is needed. The

The Duke is worried you lack the fitness to walk up Bond Street. You're generation lacks the drive.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

Could such a shift be accomplished without eventually converting to a no-growth economy and reducing the current global population? For individuals, this would mean a no less revolutionary delinking of social status from material consumption.

human happiness buttons that can be pressed—the same basic factors such as friendship, health, community, overcoming challenges with your own ingenuity, and feeling in control of your life. These work for everyone. At the same time, most of us are tempted by the ideas of convenience, status, and luxury, and buying ourselves treats to satisfy these temptations. And we're really good at justifying some of these trinkets as our true passions.

As people and as a planet we suffer from upward mobility and downward nobility.

Along with racism and sexism, our society has a hidden hierarchy based on what you do for money.

Along with racism and sexism, our society has a form of caste system based on what you do for money. We call that jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings and even at home. Why else would we consider housewives second-class citizens? Or teachers lower status than doctors even though their desk-side manner with struggling students is far better than many doctors' bedside manner with the ill and dying?