Samuel Johnson Quotes

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.

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has made nothing equal; her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

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

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.

One often has need of one, inferior to himself.

We seldom call anybody lazy, but such as we reckon inferior to us, and of whom we expect some service.

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

Men and nations cannot bear to feel inferior.

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

All men are animals; princes are animals whom no one has tied up.

It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that animals should prey upon each other.

All men are created equal in one respect, at least, and that is their desire to be unequal.

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

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.

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.

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?

There is always a human being behind the titles and the status.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

Everyone may be called "comrade," but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

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.