Joanna Southcott Quotes

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

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

The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.

He is sometimes slave who should be master; and sometimes master who should be slave.

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

If happy I and wretched he, Perhaps the king would change with me.

If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?

The men are much alarmed by certain speculations about women; and well they may be, for when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.

We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

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.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

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.

Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Those above are going down, those below are going up.

The very existence of government implies inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior of those who are not, as long as he is the repository of power.

All power is fast getting into the hands of the very lowest people.

… relative positions have a way of changing. When the underdog becomes top dog, he is hardly likely to go on considering himself bound by a bad bargain he entered into unwillingly.

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

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.