Social Leveling Quotes

In New Zealand, we have a thing called 'tall poppy syndrome,' which, you might not have heard of it, but it's essentially where - it happens in small populations usually, but can actually happen in the U.K. - where, if someone sticks out, they get their head cut off because they are being outside the ordinary or they are showing off.

There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.

If you try and level society, then nobody will do anything.

Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda.

The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.

Religion does what philosophy could never do; it shows the equal dealings of Heaven to the happy and the unhappy, and levels all human enjoyments to nearly the same standard. It gives to both rich and poor the same happiness hereafter, and equal hopes to aspire after it.

Those who attempt to level never equalize

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

At cheaper and nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest.

Water seeks its own level and water rises collectively

Karaoke is the great equalizer.

The way the Democrats go about seeking equality is to lower people at the top.

They [leftists] want to eliminate the concept of winners and losers. They want to wipe out the fact that there are any differences, particularly outcome differences, from one person to another. The things that they seek are not possible. The things that they seek are rooted in self-loathing, misery, unhappiness, crankiness, whatever.

It must not be true when the left tell us what they really want is to help and assist and elevate the little guy, 'cause they don't elevate anybody. The people I'm talking about try to make things fair by punishing and penalizing people at the top. They seek equality and fairness by reaching for the lowest common denominator they can find. Equally shared misery seems to be what their utopia is.

Humor levels the playing field. I understood that early on - that was something I had.