Quotes About Hierarchy

I was a houseman, the lowest. I was just above - in the hierarchy of jobs, I was just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers - just above, so I felt superior to them.

'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.

Imperialism [...] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.

Species are grouped together into genera, genera into orders, and orders into classes. Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead, in order to prevent the extinction of the class. But then, what of the need to perpetuate the whole phylum of vertebrates?

There is a hierarchy of entities embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle might be applied to any level of the hierarchy.

Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.

He...discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position...

His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.

They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy.

I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.' 'Yes, that's just it, you are a worm indeed.

He remembered, at school, being guided by masters through books and plays in which there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty. In those old stories, innocent but passionate love would run up against the duty owed to family, church, king, state. Some protagonists won, some lost, some did both at the same time; usually, tragedy ensued. No doubt in religious, patriarchal, hierarchical societies, such conflicts continued and still gave themes to writers.

I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant.

Mr Pope, there is no "Lady Maria and I". It is an absurd concept. You must understand just this: my daughter is a jewel as far above you as the stars.

My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.

A dog has a military mind. He respects the chain of command. He needs to know who's in charge for the good of the whole pack, and if there's no leader, he'll take the job himself- because somebody has to. The difference between a human and a dog, though, is that the dog doesn't lie awake at night dreaming of having that power. p341

Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it

A Gorean slave girl in the presence of a free man or woman always kneels, unless excused from doing so.

Everything had been based on a kind of certainty, a sense of man at the center of things, a sense of order and hierarchy. And suddenly, almost simultaneously, extraordinary discoveries are made.

I believe that Man is not the most perfect Being but One, rather that as there are many Degrees of Beings his Inferiors, so there are many Degrees of Beings superior to him.

It's a Man's Man's Man's World

When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

Where there's compassion, no heirarchy can exist. Where men are allowed to create themselves as equals, evil cannot thrive or survive.