Eric S. Raymond Quotes

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

All Society therefore is either for Gain, or for Glory; (i.e.) not so much for love of our Fellowes

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

As social animals we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.

It's not uncommon for people to overvalue the importance of demonstrating their competence and power, often at the expense of demonstrating their warmth.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

There is this power that comes with being famous.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars.

Like most animals, we're wired to associate height with power.

Class is more important than a game.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

Politics is the art of dominating men.

Kings need the company of the intelligent far more than the intelligent need the company of kings.

Men crowd into honorable careers without other vocation than their vanity, or at best their love of fame

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …

Weakness cannot cooperate with anything. Only strength can cooperate.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

'Power' is a funny thing. Maybe it's a show that draws people in because they are watching people do things they secretly wish they could do or know they could get away with.

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

I'm not that interested in just being around powerful people for the sake of it.

When young women get called bossy, it's often because they're trying to exercise power without status. It's not a problem that they're being dominant; the backlash arises because they're overstepping their status.

It's the Met Gala - everyone is huge. It feels very hierarchical, and I get really nervous in hierarchical spaces because I feel like everyone deserves to feel just as special as everyone else, but that's just not the way it is in this business.

If you're a baboon on the Serengeti, and you're miserable, it's almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.