Brian Cox Quotes

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

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

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.

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

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.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

If you try and level society, then nobody will do anything.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

We have been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.

I know that men are not equal; nowhere on the earth or in Nature is there equality—there is variety .... The natural variety must be organized through the division and gradation of functions and work; no organization of men is possible without superiors and subordinates, but it must just be an organization, and not a privilege, not aristocratic coercion but mutual service.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

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.

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

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.

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

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

All shall equal be. The Earl, the Marquis, and the Dook, The Groom, the Butler, and the Cook, The Aristocrat who banks with Coutts, The Aristocrat who cleans the boots.

In this country there is no rank but rank mutton.

There is no distinction of persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather than to noble blood.

All privileges by legislation attached to nobility, title, and rank shall be abolished.

The great families have their privileges.

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

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.