Richard Linklater Quotes

In affluent communities, where each member is keenly aware of his or her place within the Byzantine order, attracting the right friends is a blood sport. Chumming up to influential figures who are in a position to help can determine the course of an entire life.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

It's definitely particular to each situation, but whether it is a long history or someone that you're intimidated by or someone that you didn't think you ever had a shot at, at the end of the day, I think we're all living through high school, every day.

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

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Once you become successful, people know where you live, the type of house you live in, the kind of car you drive, the clothes you wear, and so it would be patronising to go and talk like a welder. Welding's a mystery to me now. You can't go back, your life changes every day.

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

When I do period work, I really like to read about the period as much as I like to look at pictures because sometimes the written word is much better at conveying what their lives were really like and how much they had and where their clothes came from. Because, a lot of time, people dressed in their Sunday best to pose for a picture.

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

In my position, I could be a debutante. But we only got to this position by being a politically active family.

It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the noble families.

In the eighties, we had the ladies who lunch, the power lunch - everything was power. At the beginning of the nineties, things changed.

Humans have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to changes in status.

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.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

At the end of the day, we're defined by our predicament, not by the sides of town.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

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

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

The structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals