Quotes About Hierarchy

A lower-ranking official was served tea on a plain tray. Once he reached the rank of chief of sector, the tray suddenly sprouted a napkin. In apparatchik-speak, the promotion was referred to as 'receiving the napkin.

Frederick II of Prussia (known as "the Great," reigned 1740–1786) famously ran his Berlin court—and the associated Academy of Sciences—in French. When Voltaire visited in 1750, he wrote to the Marquis de Thibouville that "I find myself here in France. One speaks only our language. German is for the soldiers and for the horses; it is only necessary on the road."187f

There is an immutable law in basketball: someone must fall for someone else to rise. Those at the top stay there only by beating down those just beneath them." 121 When Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan's Last Comeback

There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

Hey, I don't make the rules, I just work here. You have a complaint, take it up with the Emperor.

Anything anyone can point to in nature is composed of small patterns and is a part of larger ones.

I learned that it ruled by creating classes and dividing people, by making some better than others." "Hasn't it always been that way?" Josh asked. "Every civilization is divided…." "Not every civilization," Virginia snapped. "Only the so-called advanced ones.

There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn't task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured the boss's attention focused everybody's attention.

Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform," according to one senior intelligence figure.)

dividing society into differing castes was the same as dividing a tree into different parts and pretending that the leaf is better than the trunk.

A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contracts between the various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes...

I was surprised she'd heard us. When you're that low on the totem pole, you sometimes think you're so unimportant that no one can hear you. My sense of invisibility had made me loose-lipped.

My dad is this very sensible guy who never let me feel that anything was beyond my station.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.

Cuando se lleva a cabo la burocratización total de una administración —concluía—, se establece una forma de relación de poder que es prácticamente inquebrantable.»

Whenever global politics goes through major flux, the specters of conflict and anarchy raise their fearsome heads. Indeed, when the hierarchy of big powers changes, what is at stake is not just prestige but the stability and even survival of the international system itself.

Above all, the revolutionary group must divest itself of the forms of power—statutes, hierarchies, property, prescribed opinions, fetishes, paraphernalia, official etiquette—and of the subtlest as well as the most obvious of bureaucratic and bourgeois traits that consciously and unconsciously reinforce authority and hierarchy.

Issues such as gender discrimination, racism, and national chauvinism must be recast not only as cultural and social regressions but as evidence of the ills produced by hierarchy. A growing public awareness must be fostered in order to recognize that oppression includes not only exploitation but also domination, and that it is based not only on economic causes but on cultural particularisms that divide people according to sexual, ethnic, and similar traits.

There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.

From the family, through the school and religious institutions, the mass media, to the factory and finally trade union and "revolutionary" party, capitalist society conspires to foster obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic, and authoritarian discipline in the working class as a whole; indeed, in many of its "emancipatory" movements as well.

Revolutionary liberation must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not "mass liberation" or "class liberation" behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.