Ned Vizzini Quotes

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

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

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

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

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.

It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.

People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.

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.

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.

I reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

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

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.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

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.

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.

All men are created equal, it is only men themselves who place themselves above equality.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

All shall equal be. The Earl, the Marquis, and the Dook, The Groom, the Butler, and the Cook, The Aristocrat who banks with Coutts, The Aristocrat who cleans the boots.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

I know that men are not equal; nowhere on the earth or in Nature is there equality—there is variety .... The natural variety must be organized through the division and gradation of functions and work; no organization of men is possible without superiors and subordinates, but it must just be an organization, and not a privilege, not aristocratic coercion but mutual service.