Alexander Pope Quotes

When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment.

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.

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

A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Kings need the company of the intelligent far more than the intelligent need the company of kings.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

Who asks a king for a penny?

Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost anyplace I've ever experienced. It's made more difficult by the fact that it's constantly changing. You never know what class you belong to unless you're one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.

History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Order is Heaven's first law; and this confessed, some are, and must be, greater than the rest, more rich, more wise; but who infers from hence that such are happier, shocks all common sense. Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; bliss is the same in subject or in king.

I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.

A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse

A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.

Lords are lordliest in their wine.

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

Eminent station makes great men more great, and little ones less.

The people at the very top could fall by and grace you with their presence and give you a little largesse, and you'd be "Oh, I'm so beloved." In a way, it was kind of like flattery. The middle managers didn't quite have that cachet, but at the same time, they had to seem like they were of that caliber. So there's a little bit of loneliness at the heart of those with a little bit of power.

To me there is no difference whether president, beggar, or king.