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

“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

“A plongeur is 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

“Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own aristocratic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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.

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Daimonology has no hierarchy, but only the spell of universal anarchy.”
― Carl William Brown, Applied Daimonology. Principles and essays.

“every human creature’s formation in the discernment and delight in beauty is different, and because each of us is badly damaged with respect to our capacity to make reliable judgments about the presence and nature of beauty, we should not be very confident about the judgments we make, and should acknowledge that an artifact that seems to some human creatures crudely annoying, even repellent, may seem to others delightful in respect of its beauty. And if we put these two suggestions together we arrive at the (correct) conclusion that there is no hierarchy of beauty in artifacts obvious to all, or even most, human creatures.”
― Paul J. Griffiths (Author)

“The hierarchy of my anger is that I’m most mad at me, next I’m mad at the cops, next I’m mad at, I dunno, capitalism, after that I’m mad at people who don’t use their turn signals, then like the bottom of the Marcel anger hierarchy is probably people who pronounce espresso correctly but put the emphasis on the ‘es’ to make a big deal about how cultured they are. You’re not even on the list.”
― Margaret Killjoy, The Fortunate Death of Jonathan Sandelson

“Power's a strange thing. Some have it and some don't. Those who do have a certain way of speaking that renders options nonexistent.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“Who controls the storage and retrieval [of information]? To what extent is the material there for anyone who wants and needs it, and to what extent is it 'there' only for those who have the information that it is there, the education to obtain that information, and the power to get that education? How many people in your society are literate? How many are computer-competent? How many of them have the competence to use libraries and electronic information storage systems? How much real information is available to ordinary, non-government, nonmilitary, nonspecialist, nonrich people? What does 'classified' mean? What do shredders shred? What does money buy? In a state, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful—another piston in the great machine?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“The human being is simultaneously that which he is and that which he yearns to be.”
― Abraham Maslow