Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Social standing does not necessarily translate to social acceptance.

The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

In my position, I could be a debutante. But we only got to this position by being a politically active family.

I believe in status symbols.

in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.

I do speak well as I went to a posh school. But I come from no real breeding.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

In a world of upward mobility, choose downward servility.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Men who stand in the highest ranks of society seldom hear of their faults; if by any accident an opprobrious clamour reaches their ears, flattery is always at hand to pour in her opiates, to quiet conviction and obtund remorse.

We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy,or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.

I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity.

Money sometimes makes fools of important persons, but it may also make important persons of fools.

If you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. It is an unwritten law that human beings must be tormented throughout their lives in one way or another. If you are fortunate enough to have risen to a social level where no one does it to you for free, then you must pay for the service.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

Favor exalts a man above his equals, but his dismissal from that favor places him below them.

Class is an intangible quality which commands, rather than demands, the respect of others.

There's not even real *popularity* at my school." "That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people.

It is not only arrogant, but it is profligate, for a man to disregard the world's opinion of himself.

They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan.