Inferiority Quotes

Remember you don't own people, let them decide, choose and live. There is no inferiority and superiority; it is just your crazy imagination. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect ~ Frantz Fanon

The eye fixed on Christ sees clearly, succumbing to neither pride nor inferiority, because it is not concerned with the self at all. ~ Andree Seu World Magazine

Many Christians ... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness. ~ David A. Seamands

This point is often missed by evangelical feminists. They conclude that a difference in function necessarily involves a difference in essence; i.e., if men are in authority over women, then women must be inferior. The relationship between Christ and the Father shows us that this reasoning is flawed. One can possess a different function and still be equal in essence and worth. Women are equal to men in essence and in being; there is no ontological distinction, and yet they have a different function or role in church and home. Such differences do not logically imply inequality or inferiority, just as Christ's subjection to the Father does not imply His inferiority. ~ John Piper

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

So many of us think ourselves into smallness, into inferiority, by thinking downward. We are held back by too much caution. We are timid about venturing. We are not bold enough ... Struck down by our own caution, our own lack of faith in ourselves and our abilities. Opportunities? There were many. But always there was risk. Do we dare? We vacillate. Time hurries by. Opportunity gone. We anguish. The years roll on. Finally, we convince ourselves that it's too late and settle for cheap imitations of life. ~ Og Mandino

Does a little fish, swimming though the net's eye, suffer from inferiority complex? ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

I believe that there's no improvement if you have an inferiority complex and victim mentality. ~ Kim Namjoon

The thing is, if you're an ugly goon when you're 15, you're an ugly goon for the rest of your life - until the day you die. You're always a goon, even if lots of years go by, even if you get married and have a kid, even if you're more successful than you ever thought you'd be in your wildest dreams. You're still that same goon who everybody laughed at. It never changes. ~ David Handler

After 10 years TNA talent still have an inferiority complex. If you don't think that you work for the BEST COMPANY EVER then nobody else will! As a performer you hav to act and project that where you work is the pinnacle of competition! If not then the whole place just seems second rate. ~ Chris Jericho

Double consciousness is knowing the particularity of the white world in the face of its enforced claim to universality. Double consciousness is knowing the history offered up to black people - its many interpretations and echoes of white superiority and black inferiority, of white heroism and black cowardice, and even the temporal and geographical location of history's beginning as a step off of the African continent - is a falsehood that blacks are forced to treat as truth in so many countless ways. Double consciousness, in other words, is knowing a lie while living its contradiction. ~ Steve Biko

Never abandon the possibility of attack. Attack even from a position of inferiority, to disrupt the enemy's plans. This often results in improving one's own position. ~ Adolf Galland

Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice ... If prejudice could reason, it would dispel itself. ~ William Pickens

Happy, no. I'm unhappy because I feel myself a victim of people's rotten tricks. It's not fair and I'll say it. And I'll die saying I was unfairly treated. I've been stripped, robbed, looted, mucked up, insulted from all directions, by people who don't deserve anything. Here is exactly what I think, and I haven't any inferiority or guilt complexes towards anyone. I feel all others are guilty, not me. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

That's just your persecution complex talking. Maybe you feel like I'm looking down on you because you're simply conscious of your own inferiority? ~ Wataru Watari

Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her - first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next, as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And both were frankly inconceivable to her nature. ~ Joseph Conrad

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal ( ... ). There is a tendency ( ... ) for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious-because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe-some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others-some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. ~ Harper Lee

In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness. ~ Peter Abrahams

Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority. ~ Virginia Woolf

The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient. ~ Francis Galton

The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations. ~ Elizabeth Gould Davis

Envy is the first emotion fools experience whenever they see a genius. ~ Amit Kalantri

I had to confront my fears and master my every demonic thought about inferiority, insecurity, or the fear of being black, young, and gifted in this Western culture. ~ Lauryn Hill

Whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud ... ~ Marcel Proust

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever. ~ Ed Smith

Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see. ~ Liane Moriarty

Christians and Jews often taunted the Arabs about their polytheistic beliefs and their lack of an overarching creed and an afterlife. Consequently, a sense of religious inferiority arose among the desert dwellers, along with a pent-up desire for a comprehensive belief system of their own. ~ William J. Bernstein

We ought to be guarded against every appearance of envy, as a passion that always implies inferiority wherever it resides. ~ Pliny The Elder

Like any overt school of mysticism, a movement seeking to achieve a vicious goal has to invoke the higher mysteries of an incomprehensible authority. An unread and unreadable book serves this purpose. It does not count on men's intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions and fears. It is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation. It is not aimed at the reader's understanding, but at his inferiority complex.
An intelligent man will reject such a book with contemptuous indignation, refusing to waste his time on untangling what he perceives to be gibberish - which is part of the book's technique: the man able to refute its arguments will not (unless he has the endurance of an elephant and the patience of a martyr). A young man of average intelligence - particularly a student of philosophy or of political science - under a barrage of authoritative pronouncements acclaiming the book as "scholarly," "significant," "profound," will take the blame for his failure to understand. More often than not, he will assume that the book's theory has been scientifically proved and that he alone is unable to grasp it; anxious, above all, to hide his inability, he will profess agreement, and the less his understanding, the louder his agreement - while the rest of the class are going through the same mental process. Most of them will accept the book's doctrine, reluctantly and uneasily, and lose their intellectual integrity, condemning themselves to a chronic fog of ~ Ayn Rand

The issue of race, however, has been with us since our earliest beginnings as a nation. I believe it is even deeper and sharper than the other points of contention. It has bred fears, myths, and violence over centuries. It is the source of dark and dangerous irrationality, a current of social pathology running through our history and dimming our brighter achievements.

Most of the time the reservoir of racism remains stagnant. But--and this has been true historically for most societies--when major economic, social, or political crises arise, the backwaters are stirred and latent racial hostility comes to the surface. Scapegoats must be found, simple targets substituted for complex problems. The frustration and insecurity generated by these problems find an outlet in notions of racial superiority and inferiority. ~ Bayard Rustin

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

The fact of shame is significant. We feel spontaneously ashamed of the body and its activities. That's a sign of the body's absolute and natural inferiority.' 'Absolute and natural rubbish!' said Rampion indignantly.'shame isn't spontaneous, to begin with. It's artificial, it's acquired. You can make people ashamed of anything. Agonizingly ashamed of wearing brown boots with a black coat, or speaking with the wrong sort of accent, or having a drop at the end of their noses. Of absolutely anything, including the body and its functions. But that particular shame's just as artificial as any other. The Christians invented it, just as the tailors in Savile Row invented the shame of wearing brown boots with a black coat. There was precious little of it before Christian times. Look at the Greeks, the Etruscans. ~ Aldous Huxley

And why, oh why, I wondered, had he named me after himself? What kind of a father would do that to his son? What could he have been thinking? Was it an excess of pride? Or was it, as my sister had once theorized, just the opposite, a deep-seated sense of inferiority that made our father want to double himself? ~ George Bishop

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. ~ Virginia Woolf

Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power. ~ Auberon Waugh

She went from room to room, nosed about in the kitchen, banged furiously on the door of the bathroom which someone was occupying, and she wanted to break in, to manage, to give them a shaking, to ask them if they were going to stay in there for an hour, or remind them that it was late, that they were going to miss the car or the train, it was too late, that they had already missed something because of their carelessness, their negligence, or that their breakfast was ready, that it was cold, that it had been waiting for two hours, that it was stone-cold . . . And it seemed that from her viewpoint there was nothing uglier, more contemptible, more stupid, more hateful, that there was no more obvious sign of inferiority, of weakness, than to let one's breakfast grow cold, than to come late for breakfast. ~ Nathalie Sarraute

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. ~ Samuel Johnson

People view celebrities from a place of envy and inferiority. Instead of being personally inspired by their great artistry they see them in a position they could never attain ~ Willa Shalit

The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard's cage, is edged with shame, at the animal's superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you. ~ William Landay

When people are in a growth mindset, the stereotype doesn't disrupt their performance. The growth mindset takes the teeth out of the stereotype and makes people better able to fight back. They don't believe in permanent inferiority. And if they are behind - well, then they'll work harder and try to catch up. ~ Carol S. Dweck

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mostly because I've realized what a lame teenager I was. I was always home at the stroke of midnight; I didn't like drinking mash; I didn't have sex. I read books and had an inferiority complex because I was afraid to do all that other stuff. I don't know anything about being a badass punk rocker. ~ Karin Tidbeck

Inferiority complex begins when you agree that you are nothing. No one is responsible or author of it except yourself. ~ Paul Gitwaza

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. ~ Samuel Johnson

Never did seem right to me. S'pose Curley jumps a big guy an' licks him. Ever'body says what a game guy Curley is. And s'pose he does the same thing and gets licked. Then ever'body says the big guy oughtta pick somebody his own size, and maybe they gang up on the big guy. Seems like Curley ain't givin' nobody a chance. ~ John Steinbeck

...whether we rebelled or not, the accusation of inferiority was indelibly imprinted on school records and on our perceptions of ourselves ~ James Edwin Turner

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Most people are not really conceited, but feel a certain amount of inferiority and tend to get a little discouraged with themselves, therefore encouragement is a very important thing! I do it all the time! I praise everybody for everything they do that I see is good. ~ David Berg

Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market. ~ Mark Twain

My paycheck is so small it has an inferiority complex. ~ Mallory Kane

My brother used to say some people have an "inferiority simplex." It's not that they're under the delusion that they're inferior; they actually are inferior and they secretly know it. ~ Gregory Heisler

Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren't good enough for us. ~ Alain De Botton

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority. ~ Carter G. Woodson

The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

A great inferiority of beauty gives pain to a person conversant in the highest excellence of the kind, and is for that reason pronounced a deformity; as the most finished object with which we are acquainted is naturally supposed to have reached the pinnacle of perfection, and to be entitled to the highest applause. ~ David Hume

Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. ~ Sun Tzu

There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers - one's as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they've never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they've never had the courage to live by - they'd like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it! ~ Yukio Mishima

subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts. There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey a horse gone wonky.' Throughout most of the ~ Elaine Morgan

Everybody has an inferiority complex when they step into a room. But then when you have children and you get older, it doesn't really matter. When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't go to university. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't train. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

This was all strictly run-of-the-mill Victorian patter, striking only for the fact that a man who had so exerted himself to see the world afresh had returned with such stock observations. (And, really, very little has changed; one need only lightly edit the foregoing passages - the crude caricatures, the question of human inferiority, and the bit about the baboon - to produce the sort of profile of misbegotten Africa that remains standard to this day in the American and European press, and in the appeals for charity donations put out by humanitarian aid organizations.) ~ Philip Gourevitch

When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't go to university. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't train. Then it gets tiring. And you do get bored of it. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

Humility is not simply feeling small and useless - like an inferiority complex. It is sensing how great and glorious God is, and seeing myself in that light. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for modern civilization science and religion, in art and government, as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro, even when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were so far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule mankind for their own selfish interests. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Yes, Fraulein,' he said to Hannah. 'How gauche of you to have been born in another county. It is almost a capital offense. Here in this house we believe that one must be severely punished for the happenstance of one's birth.' His face was a jester's mask of mockery, but there was a tightness about his eyes, a tense set to his smile. 'What a dilemma for the English, though- we agree with Germany on so many things, including the patent inferiority of anyone who is not US. Darling Mum, did it ever occur to you that to the rest of the world, WE are foreigners?'
'The very idea!' Lady Liripip said with a nervous titter. ~ Laura L. Sullivan

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

Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. ~ Terry Pratchett

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education. ~ Angelina Grimke

Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men! ... The economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution. ~ Emma Goldman

Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence. ~ Gloria Steinem

Jealousy is an inner consciousness of one's own inferiority. It is a mental cancer. ~ B.C. Forbes

We as outsiders can't differentiate between Sunni and Shi'ah, but leave it to them and they'll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it's the only way of getting over it. I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil. ~ Gertrude Bell

We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest. ~ John Adams

An inferiority complex is acquired in childhood ~ Sunday Adelaja

I am not an educated person. I didn't come up through a ballet company. I came up through burlesque. So I have a lot of inferiority feelings concerning my own lack of education, my entry into show business. I'm not a Baryshnikov. I'm not a Nureyev. I came up in vaudeville. Strippers. So I've always had these feelings. But I think they've also helped me. ~ Bob Fosse

I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night. ~ Amos Oz

Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps ~ Karl Marx

Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority. ~ Ruth Benedict

Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise - absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness - the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone - a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. ~ Henry Adams

It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior. ~ Bryant McGill

Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence. ~ Joseph Conrad

See what has become of us. As far as I know, only the old Greeks had gods of drinking and the joy of life: Bacchus and Dionysus. Instead of that we have Freud, inferiority complexes and the psychoanalysis. We're afraid of the too great words in love and not afraid of much too great words in politics. A sorry generation! ~ Erich Maria Remarque

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself. ~ Henry Adams

Stripped of all their masquerades, the fears of men are quite identical: the fear of loneliness, rejection, inferiority, unmanageable anger, illness and death. ~ Joshua L. Liebman

If your ego is hurt you may become angry. Understand that ego itself is a disease. Dissolve your ego as far as possible. If you have inferiority complex, or have a very deficient ego you will loose your temper very easily. ~ Rajneesh

There is always someone smarter than you; you'd think we die from the constant pain of our mental inferiority, except that most of the time we're too stupid to feel it. ~ Brock Clarke

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we've too often doomed ourselves to be. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Any lack of balance in this respect, either too far below or too far above the mark, has an irritating effect upon the surroundings. To know if one has an inflation, a person has only to see if he or she gets on other people's nerves. If so, one is probably a bit overestimating one-self, or underestimating oneself for with an inflation a person may have feelings of either superiority or inferiority. Feelings of inferiority are just a veiled inflation. If one feels inferior, that's really ambition; a person wants to be more than one is. One wants to be a great person and knows one isn't. Inferiority is also inflation and, therefore, gets on people's nerves.
Sometimes people come in and say, "Oh well, you know, I can't do it. How do you think I can do this? You know, I'm not capable, I'm so stupid, I can't think," and so on. Then I say, "Now stop that nonsense. Get on with your job." They are really making a conceited dance out of calling themselves inferior and incapable. (p. 73) ~ Marie-Louise Von Franz

To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. ~ Earl Warren

Is it an inferiority complex or a superiority one, Henry? Do you believe that nobody can want to see you just for your own sake, or do you believe that nobody can get along without your help? ~ Ayn Rand

They came and they left.
You cried, but you stood your ground.
You stayed tethered to hope as well as
committed to dignified dreams
and little victories of day-to-day life.

You felt different.
Then you started to change.
Your smile returned with reticence
before completely taking over your face.

Today, you are no longer afraid to let that smile be there,
and now you understand it was not about them.
It was never about anyone else.
This was about you from the day you were born.
This was about you learning to love yourself -
not letting the inferiority of the external corrupt
the piety of the internal.

This was your personal revolution.
This was the uprising of your lifetime.

And you won. ~ Akif Kichloo

When the Holy Spirit comes to live within you, He will come with the ability to produce righteousness. Righteousness is the nature of God, which when imparted to the human spirit, produces the rightness of God in the human spirit. It gives man right standing with God; it gives him the ability to stand in the presence of God without a sense of guilt, inferiority or condemnation. It means rightness in God. The righteousness of God is wrought in you. ~ Chris Oyakhilome

Seen as a process of imitation, it becomes understandable why the Westernization of a backward country so often breeds a violent antagonism toward the West. People who become like us do not necessarily love us. The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate - to surpass it, leave it behind, or, better still, eliminate it completely. Now and then in history the last was done first: the imitators began by destroying the model and then proceeded to imitate it. We are apparently most at ease when we imitate a defeated or dead model. ~ Eric Hoffer

The immortalist thesis is that the time has come for the race to get rid of the intimidating gods in its own head -- grow up out of our cosmic inferiority complex (no more "dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return..."), bring our disguised desire into the open, and go after what we want, the only state of being we will settle for, which is divinity. ~ Alan Harrington

Performance for another in no way signals the inferiority of the performer to the one for whom the performance is intended. ~ Sandra Bartky