Inferior

“ You’re not worth the trouble, and it’s a confession of inferiority on our part, anyhow. The more I see of you, the less inferior I feel. Besides, I enjoy speaking out, having things understood without a lot of beating round the bush. ”

“ To permit your mind to dwell upon the inferior is to become inferior and to surround yourself with inferior things.
On the other hand, to fix your attention on the best is to surround yourself with the best, and to become the best. ”

“ In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. ”

“ I say: The people say: Let there be light. You talk about inferior people and superior people. I see no superior people and no inferior people. I see only people. When I say people I dont say good and bad. ”

“ He has detestations and preferences, even cronies; and if he has superiors, he has also inferiors. But whereas his fate depends on the esteem of a superior, the fate of no inferior depends on his esteem. ”

“ I will not drag myself up step by step, take a place in society, be compelled to show respect to superiors in return for the privilege of despising inferiors. Nothing is so imbecile as these degrees of contempt reaching down through society from the prince, who claims to be inferior to God alone, to the poorest rag-picker who must be servile to the woman from whom he hires a straw mattress for the night. ”

“ Who can endure the thought of darkening his faculties by an unworthy application of them here on earth, and degrading himself to some inferior rank of being, wherein he may find both his power and inclination to obtain wisdom and exercise virtue, exceedingly diminished? ”

“ Half and more of the actions, poses and speech of men and women is to demonstrate superiority or to avoid inferiority. There are some who feel inwardly inferior, yet disguise this feeling successfully. This feeling of inferiority may arise from purely accidental matters, such as appearance, deformity, tone of voice, etc., and the individual may either hide, become seclusive or else brazen it out, so to speak. ”

“ How far the mentally-superior may, with a balance of benefit to society, shield the mentally-inferior from the evil results of their inferiority, is a question too involved to be here discussed at length. ”

“ I have often seen people of superior, governed by people of much inferior parts, without knowing or even suspecting that they were so governed. This can only happen when those people of inferior parts have more worldly dexterity and experience, than those they govern. ”

“ From their infancy most of them have been taught to regard themselves and their own class with contempt, as inferior animals, and to regard those who possess wealth with veneration, as superior beings. ”

“ And, after such candid admission of the co-equal dignity of the truly noble arts and sciences, we may be enabled more justly to estimate the inferiority of those which indeed seem intended for the occupation of inferior powers and narrower capacities. ”

“ If an inferior meets a superior, he kisses his hand or his garment and retires, when there is a greater disparity of rank, the inferior kisses the stirrup of the superior; or prostrates himself if the superior is a prince, a fakeer, or a bashaw. ”

“ The fact is, once for all, I don’t wish to treat you like an inferior: that is” (correcting himself) , “I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years’ difference in age and a century’s advance in experience. ”

“ For the superior binds that which is inferior, and converts it to it self, and the inferior is by the same reason converted to the superior, or is otherwise affected, and wrought upon. By this reason things that receive a superior degree of any Star, bind, or attract, or hinder things which have an inferior, according as they agree, or disagree amongst themselves. ”

“ That means showing one's own inferiority; if, on the other hand you are bored, it is only what has made an unsuccessful attempt to please you, which is inferior. So realise, my dear friend, the enormity of your mistake. ”

“ Thus the mass of their contemporaries formed a strop or hone on which the superior faculties of these men were sharpened; and the great man of to-day, to whom the superior faculties have descended, owes them accordingly, not to his own ancestors only, but to the mass of inferior men who struggled with them, and were worsted in the struggle. ”

“ Dependent, having to be fed and cared for by some man, the victors take their pick perhaps, but the vanquished take what is left; and the poor women, "marrying for a home," take anything. As a consequence the inferior male is as free to transmit his inferiority as the superior to give better qualities, and does so—beyond computation. ”

“ Those of us who rub shoulders day after day with the ordinary man are perfectly well aware that the ordinary man (however much and however kindly he may seek to conceal the fact from us) regards us as his inferiors in mental capacity; and that hence he feels a peculiar and not unnatural soreness at having his errors and failings either exposed to us or exposed by us. To be shown up before your inferior brings with it, to most people, a sense of degradation; to be shown up by your inferior makes the sense of degradation yet more keenly unpleasant. ”

“ I could distinguish only that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind. ”

“ He needed to get it all straightened out.
The sense of inferiority, she'd said, the constant sense of inferiority. Let's not fool ourselves, she'd said. There isn't one of them that isn't superior to every Terran here. ”

“ They console themselves with the thought that they are superior to all the laymen in the world. This soothing vanity, neither noisy nor insolent, but none the less firmly rooted in their hearts, enables them to swallow the daily affront of conscious inferiority. ”

“ This uneasiness, which is common to every spectator, must be more sensible to the superior; and that because the near approach of the inferior is regarded as a piece of ill-breeding, and shews that he is not sensible of the disproportion, and is no way affected by it. ”

“ Hence with a higher moral nature will come a restriction on the multiplication of the inferior. ”

“ How should I know what is best for him--isn't he the one to be the judge of that? patronage, patronage, that's what they can't stand--that's what natural overmen like myself with amiable dispositions try to impose on those we think inferior to ourselves. ”

“ The feeling which makes the modern gentleman tell the labourer standing bareheaded before him to put on his hat—the feeling which gives us a dislike to those who cringe and fawn—the feeling which makes us alike assert our own dignity and respect that of others—the feeling which thus leads us more and more to discountenance all forms and names which confess inferiority and submission ”

“ Morally and physically we are treated as beings of an inferior class, and though it is not quite demonstrable that we are supposed to be without a claim to immortality of soul, yet the reward is but trivial, and we are [158] excluded the Paradise of men. ”

“ The morality of the inferior is of a type which furthers weakness. It accents sympathy. It emphasizes gregariousness. The inferior create a slavish, cringing, meek morality. They sacrifice themselves readily and humbly in behalf of others who may be inferior to themselves. ”

“ To a man whose life is regulated on a basis of a difference in rank, a part of whose training is to conserve the respect due his military station and his social supremacy, who is habituated to stiff formalities of address, both in phrase and bearing, the familiarities of an inferior have a grossness which a custom of lenient condescension, or kindly indulgence, or careless indifference does not as readily perceive. ”

“ To give an instance which must often occur. Two persons, both of feeble will, act together: one as superior, the other as inferior. The superior is very kind; the inferior is grateful. Circumstances occur to break this relation. ”

“ When we frequently make allowance for another in trifling matters, notions of inferiority take root in the mind, and too often produce contempt. Respect for the understanding must be the basis of constancy; the tenderness which flows from pity is liable to perish insensibly, to consume itself—even the virtues of the heart, when they degenerate into weakness, sink a character in our estimation. ”

“ Like mated to like, and so the superior individuals became more superior, and the inferior ones more inferior. This resulted eventually in two races. Naturally we took steps to properly segregate the inferior race. Our efficiency experts have found ways to put them to work—to make them quite useful in fact. ”

“ I have sufficient faith in my brethren to be in no wise alarmed by dismal prophecies of their rapid moral deterioration when our helplessness and general silliness no longer make a pathetic appeal to their sense of pity and authority. No doubt the consciousness of superiority is favourable to the cultivation of certain virtues—the virtues of the patron; just as the consciousness of inferiority is favourable to the cultivation of certain other virtues—the virtues of the patronized. ”

“ On the other hand are those who seek their inferiors from the vanity that demands admiration as its daily food, or the pride that feels itself oppressed in the presence of a superior, or the philanthropy that loves to give of its stores to those less endowed than itself. ”

“ Nay, and with that measure with which we mete out to others, with the same measure shall it not be meted out to ourselves? If to be dead is to be inferior, and if to be long dead is to be despicable, to the generation in [Pg 327] possession, shall not we who are in possession now have passed into the state of inferiority to-morrow, with all the other defunct beyond us, and will not a time come when some far future generation will lord it on the earth, and we shall lie deep, deep down, among the strata of the despicable?
THE END. ”

“ Why, at that early period, when impressions are received for life, impose upon him the badge of inferiority? He is to be a man; therefore he must be trained to that self-respect without which there can be no true manhood. ”

“ That in later adult life they take a very inferior place is because the nobler mental and moral qualities—comparatively recent products of social discipline and civilized habit—have at last gained massiveness enough to dominate them under normal conditions;—have become like powerful new senses upon which the primitive emotional nature learns to depend for guidance. ”

“ In order to reach such particular knowledge we must study separate types of superiority and inferiority, and we must master the special features of their formation, which in proportion to their definiteness of course lose generality of application. ”

“ I dare say you never had a chance to feel, and therefore will not be able to understand, the depressing sense of inferiority which was born with me, which grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength, and which, though somewhat repressed of late years, gets the mastery very frequently and makes me believe myself the most unlovable of beings. ”

“ Since I have learned that I have learned something else—what a cad and what a coward I have been all my life. I looked down upon those whom I considered my social inferiors. I did not think you good enough to bear my name. ”

“ I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. ”

“ That you are not my equal in education, as you assert, does not sever us, but inferiority of character would do so, for nothing but greatness attracts me--to find you base would be the death-knell of our love! ”

“ But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them as inferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards; and they are to conform to our civilization, yet without the income it requires or the social recognition it should secure. ”

“ Many of our friends who are coming to-night could not afford to dress their children as we might ours, and do you not think it would be both inhospitable and unkind, by being over-dressed, to excite any unpleasant feeling of inferiority in their minds, when actually none exists? for difference of fortune alone can never constitute inferiority. ”