Quotes About Hierarchy

Missing a game or getting a little bit of a bump up or getting a scolding once in a while puts everybody in their right place.

Leaders of the Church have often been Narcissus, flattered and sickeningly excited by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy.

The model a lot of companies use is a very pyramidal model which sort of designates that all creativity, all wisdom flows from the top. We think that's the absolute wrong model.

If you've been on top of the food chain in the Armed Forces, that's who you are. You're used to dealing with your life in a particular way.

Monarchies have some good features beyond their star qualities. They can reduce the size and parasitic nature of the management bureaucracy. They can make speedy decisions when necessary. They fit an ancient human demand for a parental (tribal/feudal) hierarchy where every person knows his place. It is valuable to know your place, even if that place is temporary. It is galling to be held in place against your will. This is why I teach about tyranny in the best possible way—by example.

Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship," Leto said. "They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!

One of the key characteristics of an elite corps is its susceptibility to those more powerful than itself. Elite power is naturally attracted to a power hierarchy and fits itself neatly, obediently into the one that promises the most personal benefits. Here is the Achilles' heel of armies, police and bureaucracies.

Surely you know bureaucracies always become voracious aristocracies after they attain commanding power.

You will address me as Sire or my Lord," Paul said.

A ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings.

If I didn't have my parents to think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He'd fall right off his desk! And it's a funny sort of business to be sitting up there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there, especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is hard of hearing.

Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great.

Nineteen-eighty-two is a vintage of legendary proportions for all levels of the Bordeaux hierarchy. In short, it is a vintage which has produced the most perfect wines in the post-World War II era.

Number 4 should have been number 1. Thanks, Honey.

The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain are the next; the sovereign is the least.

Church leaders don't know how to deal with this chronic crisis; as with the out-of-touch Orthodox hierarchy and clergy of the late imperial period, many don't seem to realize what's happening, much less how to address the decay.

La nueva era derrocó el modelo aristotélico y cristiano del cosmos, que proponía una estructura jerárquica de la realidad en la que las cosas existían orgánicamente a través de su relación con Dios, y lo sustituyó por el de un universo mecánico regido por las leyes de la naturaleza, no necesariamente basado en lo trascendente.

Laws and machines are shaped to fit the classes.

This was also demonstrated to a more marked extent in the universal segregation of Dalit groups across all religions. Because much of religion was also linked to caste, it was not surprising that Christianity and Islam in India also functioned through a variety of sects, and recognized caste inequality and hierarchy in practice, however much they may have disavowed it in theory.

After all," she inquired, "isn't heaven a sort of snobbism? A Looking-up, a preference for the best hotel?

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.

Janet did not believe it was feasible to be single; to Janet a bachelor eked out his living on the margins of society, orbiting the married couples wild-eyed and feral as a homeless man at a polo party. A single man, to Janet, was superior in the social hierarchy only to a single woman--this last a life form that was repellent but fortunately short-lived, naked and glistening as it gobbled its way out of its larval cocoon.

The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.