Sinclair Lewis Quotes

Men and nations cannot bear to feel inferior.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

A deck of cards is built like the purest of hierarchies, with every card a master to those below it, a lackey to those above it.

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.

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

One often has need of one, inferior to himself.

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.

The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

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

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.

The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals. And have no hope of rising in their own self esteem but by lowering their neighbors.

It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.

When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.

I never call them 'guys;' I always call them 'boys.' Maybe it's a superiority complex - my needing to keep them down.

Their authority over their slaves renders them vain and imperious.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.

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.

Somebody accumulates a lot of muscle and think himself to be a big man. But this big man is only big when all around him are smaller.

Humans want to know the hierarchy; it's important for there to be one leader.

To strive with an equal is dangerous; with a superior, mad; with an inferior, degrading.

It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.

Only those beneath me can envy or hate me. I have never been envied nor hated; I am above no one. Only those above me can praise or belittle me. I have never been praised nor belittled; I am below no one.

If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence.

It's obviously a characteristic of human beings that we like to feel superior to others, but our problem is we are not superior