Hierarchy Quotes

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. (Laurence J. Peter)
Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance. View quote
Andrea Dworkin
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations. View quote
David Deutsch
I would say the hierarchy has made terrible errors in judgment and it has to seek forgiveness by its members. View quote
William P. Leahy
And a third thing is the understanding of the Church as a community, a communion which is just a hierarchy but the people of God, whose servants are the priests and bishops. View quote
Hans Küng
Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles. View quote
Alain de Botton
I am convinced that the majority of the religious hierarchy today deplores the hardship inflicted on our people. I am referring not only to the martyrs but of the families who have been dispersed and terrified, who have no resources, and to the four million unemployed who are suffering from the economic chaos of a country which only a year earlier was giving employment to a million foreigners. Those who have chosen to serve God must feel profoundly sad at seeing ridicule poured on the most sacred principles of our religion. View quote
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi
Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. View quote
Yann Martel
The fact that goals may be dependent for their force on other more distant ends leads to the arrangement of these goals in a hierarchy - each level to be considered as an end relative to the levels below it and as a mean to the levels above it. View quote
Herbert Simon
Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities. View quote
Emil Cioran
I've always run by the hierarchy of "If not funny, interesting. If not interesting, hot. If not hot, bizarre. If not bizarre, break something." (Jon Stewart)
I'm struck by how laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy. View quote
John Cleese
Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power. View quote
Murray Rothbard
Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level. View quote
Douglas Hofstadter
I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy. View quote
Richard Linklater
One advantage of exhibiting a hierarchy of systems in this way is that it gives us some idea of the present gaps in both theoretical and empirical knowledge. Adequate theoretical models extend up to about the fourth level, and not much beyond. Empirical knowledge is deficient at practically all levels. View quote
Kenneth Boulding
Modern religious teaching have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues. View quote
Josef Pieper
Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated. View quote
Michael Parenti
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. View quote
Noam Chomsky
The systems view of nature and man is clearly non- anthropocentric, but it is not non-humanistic for all that. It allows us to understand that man is one species of system in a complex and embracing hierarchy of nature, and at the same time it tells us that all systems have value and intrinsic worth. They are goal-oriented, self-maintaining, and self-creating expressions of nature's penchant for order and adjustment. The status of man is not lessened by admitting the amoeba as his kin, nor by recognizing that sociocultural systems are his supersystems. Seeing himself as a connecting link in a complex natural hierarchy cancels man's anthropocentrism, but seeing the hierarchy itself as an expression of self-ordering and self-creating nature bolsters his self-esteem and encourages his humanism. View quote
Ervin László
There's a really classic cliche every time you switch the TV on - you see cops arguing. I have spent a day a week for many years in the presence of police and I have never seen them argue. It's a military hierarchy. They do what they're told. There's no bickering. (Peter James)
In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it. View quote
Steven Johnson
Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since. View quote
Tana French
The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth. View quote
Francois Furet
We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life. View quote
Gordon W. Allport