Tomas G. Masaryk 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.

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.

Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

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.

In this country there is no rank but rank mutton.

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

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.

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

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

The whole of society is like a cabbage-stalk covered with caterpillars, and none is satisfied till it has crawled to the top.

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

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

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.

Distinction in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

The great families have their privileges.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

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.

The people of England are not, like the people of France, lovers of naked political equality. England is a great lover of liberty; but of equality she never has been so much enamored.

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

…to make a commonwealth is to divide it into parties, which setteth them at perpetual variance, the one party endeavouring to preserve their eminence and inequality, and the other to attain their equality.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

It's the Met Gala - everyone is huge. It feels very hierarchical, and I get really nervous in hierarchical spaces because I feel like everyone deserves to feel just as special as everyone else, but that's just not the way it is in this business.