Azzedine Alaia Quotes

Your part can be the king, but unless people are treating you like royalty, you ain't no king, man.

There is no distinction of persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather than to noble blood.

Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

There is no good in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else. The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

My father was a guy who, because of the businesses he was in - the hotel business, the hospitality business - he didn't differentiate between the waiter serving you dinner, from the maitre d from the guy who owns a restaurant. Everybody was the same to him. He didn't look at who you were. He didn't look at your wallet.

Authority doesn't work without prestige, or prestige without distance.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.

Because I have a little bit more, that means I'm better than you? No. Unacceptable.

I deeply detest social distinction and snobbery, and in that lies my strong aversion to titular honours.

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

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

Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty.

The mind is lowered through association with inferiors. With equals it attains equality; and with superiors, superiority.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

I treat everyone with the same respect they treat me with. Just because I earn more money doesn't make me more special than them or give me the right to talk to them in a certain manner.

We come from that school where we don't believe we're different from you, and it's insulting to me on some kind of weird level that musicians are put on a pedestal.

There's not a sense that the person who is waiting on the table is somehow a lesser person that the person who is eating in the restaurant.

Money is a great dignifier.

Surely, it is much easier to respect a man who has always had respect, than to respect a man who we know was last year no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year.

It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.

A man is a man, on a throne or in a pigsty.

It is better to be envied than pitied.