Hierarchy Quotes

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

~ Joseph Conrad

Collaboration has no hierarchy. The Sun collaborates with soil to bring flowers on the earth.

~ Amit Ray

There is a higher form of hierarchy and that is the hierarchy of the spirit. When I stand in front of a person, I stand in front of a soul and I have met magnificent souls in bodies possessing no money, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies bathed in riches. In the same light, I have met magnificent souls in bodies bathed in wealth, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies that are impoverished. I am tired of people busying their minds with hierarchy based upon money, because this form of hierarchy is primitive; meanwhile there is an altogether higher form of hierarchy that is of the soul. As you judge man and woman based upon their riches, I laugh at your primitive form of judgment! When I stand in front of a human, I stand in front of a soul.

~ C. Joybell C.

The last time everyone loved or at least liked everyone was when the world had a population of about 4.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A poor, who hates power, once become powerful, hates poor.

~ Amit Kalantri

A powerful process automatically takes care of progress, productivity and profits.

~ Amit Kalantri

Without the persistent rising up of individuals that seek the Lord and place themselves under His direct leadership, churches will inevitably...slip into human hierarchy, institutionalizing a system of doctrines and practices.

~ Henry Hon

A man might share his wealth, but never his authority.

~ Amit Kalantri

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.

~ Lorrie Moore

We are the same, you and I. Whether samurai or night-hawk, the Suruga Dainagon or member of the Toudouza, it makes no difference. My sword is the proof....These words, wrung from the very depths of his soul, surprised even Seigen himself. He had not risen in the world merely in order to satisfy his ambition, but in order to repudiate hierarchical society and the fixed class system.

~ Takayuki Yamaguchi

The middle class were invented to give the poor hope; the poor, to make the rich feel special; the rich, to humble the middle class.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.

~ Thomas Mann

Unfortunately, in a hierarchical structure, power relationships tend to determine the content; there is always the danger that a rank-based logic will prevail. Managers, intent on advancement, tend to supply the information they know their superiors want to hear, rather than the information they ought to hear. Large organizations tend, therefore, to become systematically stupid.

~ John Médaille

In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

~ Frank Herbert

The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel actions are, the more necessary are master builders. Dislike of the leader and the promoter, though linked emotionally to progressivism, is linked logically to total conservatism. Conversely, an authoritarian approach, natural enough in the instigator of new activities, is unjustified in the mere overseer of routines.

~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do...

~ Joe Abercrombie

In business, everyone has a different weight.

~ Nabil N. Jamal

If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.

~ Bell Hooks

Maybe it is not a coincidence that, even in heaven, under the perspective of the Bible, there is a hierarchy. After all, what better way to impose the “benefits” of accepting the power of a hierarchy in the human mind?

~ Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Whatever the religion, we are formatted to accept hierarchy without any questions and while most management studies discuss business models, organisation and power structure, they seldom question the different types of hierarchies. One has to wonder if this hierarchy really is an absolute truth…

~ Miguel Reynolds Brandao

One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It’s hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It’s implicit.

~ Cliff James

All people want to belong to some sort of hierarchy. Allow me to explain. The rich want to be the richest; the poor want to be the smartest; those who are both rich and smart want to be the better persons; the better persons want to go to heaven; those who are in heaven will look down upon those who are in hell... there is always some kind of hierarchy desired by everyone; even by those who claim the opposite of this. So how do you find true divinity? Divinity is found in those who reach down low; because it is those who are above who must reach down low, while it is those who are below who must constantly reach for what is above! And this is divinity. What is divine, is what will have a curiosity in what is below. There is no fear of becoming tainted; because what is lesser can never really taint what is greater. it is what is greater than is able to transform what is lesser. The alchemist must first find the mud, pick it up, before she is able to transform it into diamond.

~ C. Joybell C.

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

~ Francis Parker Yockey

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps

~ Karl Marx

Social ascendency, innocently disguised as high fashion, good taste or prestigious expenditure, was the same the world over.

~ John Keay

There's a problem with the hierarchical orientation, though. When the numbers get too big, the thing breaks down. A pecking order can hold only so many chickens.

~ Steven Pressfield

When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

~ Ed Catmull

Instead it is the Church hierarchy that is rather teaching congregation to be afraid of darkness, instead of teaching them to go with light to overcome darkness.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must start young, and young people are limited by the chair system. Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work....Industry is more likely to put its research effort into its daily business. It is very difficult for it to become involved in pure chemistry. There is a need to encourage long-range research, even if we don't know its goal and if its application is unknown.

~ Kenichi Fukui

He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.

~ Nikolai Gogol

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don't have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to natural resources for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life.

~ Lierre Keith

The strength of a human being is in one's hierarchical level, characterised by say separation from physiological needs upwards.

~ Priyavrat Thareja

Yeah... they tell you to work from the inside, which is perhaps their greatest deception of all...

~ Josh Burggraf

It is a truth widely recognized that tyranny stems from the consent of the governed as much as democracy does.

~ Eric Robert Morse

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

~ Carl Sagan

Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but I wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.

~ Megan Whalen Turner

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

~ Derrick Jensen

Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.

~ Nicolás Gómez Dávila