Martin Luther Quotes

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

Order is Heaven's first law, and this confessed, Some are, and must be greater than the rest -

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things.

In India, cast not class … is what counts most in popular life.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

I don't like a class system. I don't like the idea of being in a different class than other people.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.

Every seeming equality conceals a hierarchy.

The great would have none great and the little all little.

Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.

One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

It seems to be part of the human condition to need someone you can look down on. I still don't get that one.

It's funny, but on a set there's a pecking order. There's a caste system, you know? It goes from the star down to the extra. That includes the crew as well. I've never liked that.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.