Paulo Coelho Quotes

Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.

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

Men and nations cannot bear to feel inferior.

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 goblins of the city may hold committees to divide a single potato, but the strong and the cruel still sit on the hill, and drink vodka, and wear black furs, and slurp borscht by the pail, like blood. Children may wear through their socks marching in righteous parades, but Papa never misses his wine with supper. Therefore, it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.

Every class is unfit to govern.

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

It seems to be part of the human condition to need someone you can look down on. I still don't get that one.

Class still matters in Britain today.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.

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.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you. You have a $500 suit on and you're still a lowlife.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

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.

I know why they don't like me because they want the money I have.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

Revolution applies a local anaesthetic to one class of society and operates on the other.

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

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

The majority in every society is always the backward. The diligent are no more than thirty percent of the society. It is a natural law that the diligent breed will exploit the backward breed as best they can, like the fish at sea, where the strong eat the weak. It is inconsequential whether the diligent are capitalists and merchants, as in the bourgeois government, or whether the diligent are the managers and supervisors, the intellectuals and the allotters as in the communist government. Ultimately, the diligent will exploit the laboring backward to the best of their ability.