Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Inferiority

"There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain." -

"Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

"We ought to be guarded against every appearance of envy, as a passion that always implies inferiority wherever it resides." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

"Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit." - Madame de Puisieux, Madeleine de Puisieux

"One of the best methods of rendering study agreeable is to live with able men, and to suffer all those pangs of inferiority which the want of knowledge always inflicts." - Sydney Smith

"People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"Everyone… has a feeling of inferiority. But the feeling of inferiority is not a disease; it is rather a stimulant to health, normal striving and development. It becomes a pathological condition only when the sense of inadequacy overwhelms the individual and, far from stimulating him to useful activity, makes him depressed and incapable of development." -

"An inferiority complex is a disbelief in your own self, your own powers of mind. This to me is a sin, for every human being has been made in the image of God and is perfect, whole, and complete." - Albert E Cliffe

"Racism is a way of thinking that has dogmatized the notion that one ethnic group is condemned by the laws of nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is marked off as hereditarily superior." - Joseph F. Doherty

"The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo-self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority." - Alfred Adler

"The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment... both of individuals and of humanity." - Alfred Adler

"We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority." - Alfred Adler

"The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and of humanity." - Alfred Adler

"The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate." - Eric Hoffer

"It is impossible to consider the feeling of inferiority without determining it in terms of the future and of my possibilities." - Jean-Paul Sartre

"The word “independence” is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word “dependence” is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption." - Jeremy Bentham

"Race prejudice, in its gravest and most typical form, is the passing judgment of criminality or of essential inferiority upon all the members of a racial or ethnic group, with no sufficient intellectual motive for such a judgment." - John LaFarge

"Outrage is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority." - José Ortega y Gasset

"Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." -

"Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot succeed. A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement." - Norman Vincent Peale

"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated. " - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills

"The vice of envy is… always a confession of inferiority." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Hiding your faults from others so they won’t correct you might save you from momentary unpleasantness, but you will remain with your faults... Fear of criticism stems from inferiority feelings... If you feel hurt by someone’s criticism, remember it is your choice to feel hurt. You can choose self-statements that allow you to feel grateful for the opportunity to improve yourself." - Zelig Pliskin

"Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one's own." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

"Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through "opinions" and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through "opinions" or ridicule." - Napoleon Hill

"Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national." - Philip Wylie, fully Philip Gordon Wylie

"Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"I’d like to be remembered as one who kept my priorities in the right order. We live in a changing world, but we need to be reminded that the important things have not changed. I have always encouraged my restaurant Operators and team members to give back to the local community. We should be about more than just selling chicken; we should be a part of our customer’s lives and the communities in which we serve." - S. Truett Cathy

"Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it — the present, that is to say, must have become the past — before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me" - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Insanity, as well as delirium, may be considered as divisible into two kinds; one of which may be called ideal, and the other notional insanity." - Thomas Arnold

"There is no value for the brilliantly shining diamond-like piece of glass in the eyes of a jeweller." - Uttaradhyayana Sutra

"The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specializations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall

"But by no means limit ourselves to address the problem of religion in the abstract-to-idealistically, as a matter of reasoning completely detached from the class struggle (as they often radical bourgeois democrats). It would be absurd to imagine that, in a society based on the endless oppression and degradation of the toiling masses, we may remove religious prejudices with a mere preaching. It would give evidence of a bourgeois narrow-mindedness, lose sight of the fact that religious oppression of humanity is only the fruit or reflection aspect of economic oppression in society. Neither the books nor preaching can enlighten the proletariat positively if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. The union in this genuinely revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class to make the earth a heaven, is more important to us than unity of proletarian criteria about imaginary paradise of heaven. 's why we do not represent or declare in our program that we are atheists , which is why we do not ban or prohibit proletarians who still cling to the vestiges of the old prejudices that come into closer contact with our party. Always preach a scientific philosophy, we must combat the absurdities of Christians, but this does not mean that the religious question should be placed in the foreground where it does not belong. We must not allow the forces oriented in a genuinely revolutionary struggle, economic and political, where infringements on behalf of opinions and conceptions of much less importance, they quickly lose any political significance and are gradually relegated to the pile by the normal course of economic development. The reactionary bourgeoisie, here as elsewhere, always strives stoke religious antagonisms in order to divert attention from the masses of those really important and fundamental issues, both economic and political, that the Russian proletariat is in the process of deciding through the practice of the revolutionary struggle. This reactionary tactic of dividing the proletarian forces, which today is mainly manifested in the pogroms of the Black Hundreds, tomorrow can be expressed in more subtle forms. Anyway, we know oppose this our propaganda firm sustained and patient towards proletarian solidarity and scientific philosophy that will prevent differences arising secondary." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers." - William James

"To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive." - Elizabeth Gould Davis

"One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing." - Emma Goldman

"With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power." - Emma Goldman