Bernard de Mandeville Quotes

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

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

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.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

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

I remember being taught my place.

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

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

tis hard to live in a world where all look upon you as below them.

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

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.

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

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

What you're saying is that 'I, the superior elite, will take care of you.' Why? Because, you see, that superior, elite group needs to feel superior and elite. And they can't be superior and elite unless you have a whole lot of people down there groveling around. So you keep them down there by feeding them.

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

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.

The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

Language does not make one an elite.

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.

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

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