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“To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority.”
― Chamfort

“The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”
― Alain de Botton

“The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“The rationale that etiquette should be eschewed because it fosters inequality does not ring true in a society that openly admits to a feverish interest in the comparative status-conveying qualities of sneakers. Manners are available to all, for free.”
― Judith Martin, Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson

“Anger is about status injury.”
― Martha Nussbaum

“I can tell you right now where you're going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where? People get to places like Yale and think that they've "arrived," only to discover that there are still other places to arrive at, and other places after that, and so on and so forth in an infinite recession, like the vista in a double mirror.”
― William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“Privileged women continue the tradition of compensating for their authority to men through affectations of disablement �� from dieting and other disorders to substance abuse, institutionalised detachment from their children, and so on.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“ربما يكون الخوف وحده هو جذر مشكلة المتغطرسين، لأن الواثقين في قيمتهم الذاتية لن يتسلّوا بتحقير الآخرين. وراء الاختيال والغرور يكمن ذعر مقيم، فحينما ننقل لبعض الناس الشعور بأنهم غير أكفاء لنا، يأتي القصَاص اللازم بشعورنا بالدونية إزاء أشخاص آخرين.
يتدفق هذا الخوف منتقلًا عبر الأجيال. فعلى المنوال المعهود في كل مسلكٍ مُهين وفاسد، لا ينجبُ المتغطرسون إلا متغطرسين أمثالهم. ينقل كل جيل للجيل التالي العدوى ذاتها، التي تَعتبر بصورة غريبة المكانة المتواضعة طامة كبرى، حارمين ذُريتهم من أي سَند عاطفي قد يدعمهم ويمنحهم راحة داخلية، عندما يرون أن المكانة المتواضعة (لهم أو للآخرين) لا تساوي بالضبط انعدام قيمة المرء، ولا أن المكانة العالية هي مرادف الأصالة والامتياز.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“Patriarchal status has always been contingent on the display of property.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine