Mark Twain Quotes

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

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

I think there's always going to be some kind of bigotry or some kind of racism. There has to be, because people can't feel that they have any hero qualities unless there's someone beneath them.

I feel that discrimination and hierarchy is something that people have to face constantly.

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.

What you're saying is that 'I, the superior elite, will take care of you.' Why? Because, you see, that superior, elite group needs to feel superior and elite. And they can't be superior and elite unless you have a whole lot of people down there groveling around. So you keep them down there by feeding them.

It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.

The class struggle, to which Marx has specially drawn attention, is a real factor, the tokens of which are to be found on every page of history. But the struggle is not confined only to two classes: the proletariat and the capitalist; it occurs between an infinite number of groups with different interests, and above all between the elites contending for power. The existence of these groups may vary in duration, they may be based on permanent or more or less temporary characteristics. In the most savage peoples, and perhaps in all, sex determines two of these groups.

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a) he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't ; b) he has a high IQ, but they don't.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.

I try to not be or associate with elitists.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

Being a monarchist, and fawning over those 'above' you, you must naturally despise those 'below' or on the same socioeconomic level as yourself, because that is how hierarchy worship works.

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

I'm attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I'm sick of that.

America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.

The South came to adopt a social philosophy wonderfully like that of Germany …. Inequality became the natural order; slavery was accepted as a blessing from heaven; and masters of plantations became the supermen from whom ideas and good reasoning were confidently expected.

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.