Josh Lucas Quotes

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.

I love watching the Serengeti, the way lions live. The only way the king lion loses his crown is by somebody physically defeating him.

Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.

The sudden death of the leading man will cause change, making another man leader. Soon, but too late, the young man will attain high office. By land and sea, he will be feared.

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.

Danger knows full well that Caesar is more dangerous than he. We are two lions litter’d in one day, and I the elder and more terrible.

American society is very like a fish society. . . . Among certain species of fish, the only thing which determines order of dominance is length of time in the fishbowl. The oldest resident picks on the newest resident, and if the newest resident is removed to a new bowl, he, as oldest resident, will pick on the newcomers.

Don’t try threatening an Alpha. They don’t like it.

You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.

Sweetie, in our world, fair’s got nothing to do with anything. He who has the greatest power wins. It’s why we’re all willing to kill each other off without flinching. (Solin)

I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy, To share with me in glory any more: Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.

Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

Youth wrenches the sceptre from old age, and sets the crown on its own head before it is entitled to it.

It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

The world belongs to those who possess it, and is scorned by those to whom it should belong.

We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.

The Iron Throne is mine by rights. All those who deny that are my foes." "The whole of the realm denies it, brother," said Renley. "Old men deny it with their death rattle, and unborn children deny it in their mothers' wombs. They deny it in Dorne and they deny it on the Wall. No one wants you for their king. Sorry.

The handover of power to [Dmitry] Medvedev was rather painless, everybody thought that the waves would calm automatically. By now, it's quite clear that [Vladimir] Putin doesn't want to relinquish the levers of power.

With kings, nations, and private individuals, the strongest assume to themselves rights over the weakest, and the same rule is followed by animals, by matter, by the elements, so that everything is performed in the universe by violence. And that order which we blame with some appearance of justice is the most universal, most absolute, most unchangeable, and most ancient law of nature.

My books are always about someone obtaining a power to replace the previous sort of power that they held.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

This human struggle and scramble for office, for a way to live without work, will finally test the strength of our institutions.