Superiority Quotes - Page 7

• People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

  Van Wyck Brooks

  People, Bent, Prowess

  "Opinions of Oliver Allston".

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• You don't play a game or color a picture with a child to show your superiority. Rather, you choose to limit yourself so as to facilitate and honor that relationship.

  William P. Young

  Children, Color, Games

  6 Copy quote

• ...We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Lonely, Giving Up, Loneliness

  101 Copy quote

• The neutron warhead is a defensive weapon designed to offset the great superiority that the Soviet Union has on the western front against the NATO nations.

  Ronald Reagan

  Neutrons, Unions, Weapons

  7 Copy quote

• I know no other sign of superiority than Goodness.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Goodness, Knows

  10 Copy quote

• And whilst he may not claim superiority by reason of learning, I myself must not withold that meed of homage that learning, wherever it resides, always commands.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  May, Reason, Claims

  Mahatma Gandhi, Rudrangshu Mukherjee (1993). “The Penguin Gandhi Reader”, p.209, Penguin Books India

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish - because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals - to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to understand others and meet their needs.

  George Gilder

  Sacrifice, Frustration, Giving

  George Gilder (1985). “The Spirit of Enterprise”, Simon & Schuster

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is the most effective, practical way of raising the wealth of nations? What causes wealth? I have come to think that the dream of democratic socialism is inferior to the dream of democratic capitalism, and that the latter's superiority in actual practice is undeniable.

  Michael Novak

  Dream, Thinking, Practice

  Michael Novak (1991). “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism”, p.26, Rowman & Littlefield

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  People, Moral, Defeat

  5 Copy quote

• After an inferior man has been taught a doctrine of superiority he will remain as inferior as he was before his lesson. He will merely assume himself to be superior, and attempt to employ his recently-learned tactics against his own kind, whom he will then consider his inferiors. With each inferior man enjoying what he considers his unique role, the entire bunch will be reduced to a pack of strutting, foppish, self-centered monkeys gamboling about on an island of ignorance. There they will play their games under the supervision of their keeper, who was and always will be a superior man.

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Ignorance, Unique, Men

  Anton Szandor LaVey (2000). “The Devil's Notebook”, p.143, Feral House

  50 Copy quote

  Show source

• The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.

  Charles Darwin

  Europe, Civilization, People

  Charles Darwin (2004). “Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex”, p.120, Barnes & Noble Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighboring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded air of superiority.

  Horace Walpole

  Air, Vulgar, Nations

  Letter to Hannah More, 14 October 1787, in 'Letters'

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Friendship with a man is friendship with his virtue, and does not admit of assumptions of superiority.

  Mencius

  Friendship, Men, Doe

  Mencius (1861). “The Chinese Classics”, p.252

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• The harmony of natural law reveals an Intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

  Albert Einstein

  Reflection, Thinking, Law

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.28, Open Road Media

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Racism is a belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another.

  Neal Boortz

  Race, Racism, Belief

  4 Copy quote

• This is not just a simple story of "money can't buy happiness." Or maybe that's just what it is. And if it is, why shouldn't it be? Because if this is something we are already supposed to know, then why don't we know it? Why do we chase and scrabble and fight for things to flaunt, why? Why do we reach for power over other people, and through the thin superiority of our possessions, believe we have it? Why do we let money make people bigger, and allow those without it to be made smaller? How did we lose the truth in the frantic, tribal drumbeat of more, more, more?

  Deb Caletti

  Believe, Fighting, Simple

  Deb Caletti (2009). “The Fortunes of Indigo Skye”, p.256, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision. Always I reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

  David Hume

  Men, Decision, Miracle

  David Hume (2016). “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Revision of Great Book”, p.88, VM eBooks

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Vanity, Trying, Gang

  4 Copy quote

• The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.

  Aristotle

  War, Men, Light

  229 Copy quote

• Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.

  John Ruskin

  Kindness, Men, Giving

  John Ruskin (1872). “The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858-9”, p.149

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Taken, People

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.12, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

  Leo Strauss

  Past, Views, Understanding

  Leo Strauss (1959). “What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies”, p.68, University of Chicago Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

  Ellen Willis

  Lonely, Opposites, Feelings

  "Three Elegies for Susan Sontag". "New Politics", Vol. X, No. 3, Summer 2005.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Philosophy is the science of estimating values. The superiority of any state or substance over another is determined by philosophy. By assigning a position of primary importance to what remains when all that is secondary has been removed, philosophy thus becomes the true index of priority or emphasis in the realm of speculative thought.

  Manly Hall

  Philosophy, Priorities, Substance

  "The Secret Teachings of All Ages". Book by Manly P. Hall, 1928.

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Mother, Discovery, Parent

  Alexander McCall Smith (2008). “Love Over Scotland”, p.279, Hachette UK

  10 Copy quote

  Show source