Social Climbing Quotes

Social climbing and power climbing
the two are often synonymous
are what make Washington run ... If there are more than two people together, if there are three, one of them is climbing. ~ Sally Quinn

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave.

I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls.

I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us.

As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to ~ Pete Hamill

Education is the way out of the poverty trap. It shouldn't be the poverty trap itself and make those trying to better themselves incur massive student debt. ~ Stewart Stafford

Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic! ~ Thomas Hoving

If he hadn't become a Buddhist monk, Sawaki Roshi would have been successful in a worldly sense in business, politics, or the military. Instead, he devoted his life to wholeheartedly practicing Dogen Zenji's just sitting, or shikantaza, which according to him was good for nothing. For him, social climbing in pursuit of fame and profit was meaningless. The Japanese expression for "waste" is bonifuru, which means "sacrifice," "lose all," or "ruin." So when we say he wasted his life, we use the expression in a paradoxical way - like saying that zazen is good for nothing. ~ Kosho Uchiyama

Merciful heaven, social status is something to be strived for, not born with, or, worse yet, displayed. Social status is a reward for social climbing, a pursuit that may get you the attention of other limelighthers but won't move you up one skinny rung as far as your social station in Dixie is concerned. ~ Ann Barrett Batson

[On social climbing:] Everything that goes up must come down. ~ Maxine Cheshire

Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of "playing". A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which "neighborhoods" have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of "neighbor childrens" houses or play in "backyards". In the absence of sidewalks in newer "gated" coummunities, children cannot "walk" to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A "playdate" is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.
In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been awaiting. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

She would have got a gold medal in social climbing if it was an Olympic sport ~ Marlene Perez

And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself. ~ Ken Wilber

I don't know when the last time was that Steven Spielberg or George Lucas made a movie with Universal, but I can tell you that Universal is leading the charge. They're looking at film differently. They're planning ahead in a way that I've never seen a studio do before. They're believing in a relationship between fan and film franchise, in a new way. They're more receptive to an audience, in part because of social media, in a way we've never been allowed. ~ Vin Diesel

Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism. ~ Ellen Key

The challenge of being authentic for people pleasers is that we really want people to like and accept us. Being vulnerable, however, requires that we come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to like us, and that it is okay. Not everyone needs to like us. ~ Susan C. Young

... on being somewhat antisocial-
"You have less people at your funeral but you get more reading time. ~ Robert James Waller

One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself. ~ Rose Macaulay

When the Starbursts cost a cent apiece, the average number of candies per customer was 3.5, but when the price went down to zero, the average went down to 1.1 per customer. The students limited themselves to a large degree when the candy was free. In fact, almost all the students applied a very simple social-norm rule in this situation - they politely took one and only one Starburst ... What these results mean is that when price is not a part of the exchange, we become less selfish maximizers and start caring more about the welfare of others. We saw this demonstrated by the fact that when the price decreased to zero, customers restrained themselves and took far fewer units. ~ Dan Ariely

Every condition exists," Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum." Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. ~ Matthew Desmond

There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present. ~ Washington Irving

On the raptors kept for falconry:
"They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood."
"What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry."
"Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think ~ T.H. White

For Feric Jaggar is essentially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior. He would be able to manipulate the surface of social reality by projecting his own pathologies upon it, but he would never be able to share in the inner communion of interpersonal relationships. Such a creature could give a nation the iron leadership and sense of certainty to face a mortal crisis, but at what cost? Led by the likes of a Feric Jaggar, we might gain the world at the cost of our souls. No, ~ Norman Spinrad

There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty. ~ George Farquhar

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism
that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything. ~ Robert Penn Warren

You marry out of free will. If I marry, it will be from a personal choice, not some social compulsion or norm. ~ Sonam Kapoor

Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:
(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;
(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;
(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest
that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.
This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments. ~ John Ralston Saul

A lot of people use social media to share mundane things or for self-glorification. I try to use it to share interesting things with people. ~ Ashton Kutcher

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous "recurrence of birth" a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other p ~ Joseph Campbell

The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps. ~ Matthew Desmond

Regardless of how anyone treats you, you stand to benefit. While some people teach you who you do want to be, others teach you who you don't want to be. And it's the people who teach you who you don't want to be that provide some of the most lasting and memorable lessons on social graces, human dignity, and the importance of acting with integrity. ~ Kari Kampakis

They needed to develop an interest in the world, they needed social contact and to develop an aspiration to improve their wellbeing before we had any chance of persuading them to become involved in self-managing their health and wellness. ~ FlatBear Publishing

Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass. ~ Emma Goldman

I favor the abolition of all Social Security, Medicare and estate taxes. In their place, we should create a simple income tax system that has no deductions or credits at all. ~ Ari Fleischer

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of our age is the subsiding of all other concerns to the predominance of politics. And thus, we have succumbed to a Lyndon Johnson-like dependence upon the power of the state.

The tragic result has been that all of life has been politicized, and if the new social engineers have their way, politics will increase in power - especially in its power to penetrate into our everyday lives and rule our destinies. For in fact politics has become, for many of the political elite, a kind of state religion. ~ George Grant

Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity of cultural influences which the author had at his disposal. Literature, with Chaucer, has taken on a new role: as well as affirming a developing language, it is a mirror of its times - but a mirror which teases as it reveals, which questions while it narrates, and which opens up a range of issues and questions, instead of providing simple, easy answers. ~ Ronald Carter

Reading has been proven to sharpen analytical thinking, enabling us to better discern patterns – a handy tool when it comes to the often baffling behaviour of ourselves and others. But fiction in particular can make you more socially able and empathetic. Last year, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology published a paper showing how reading Harry Potter made young people in the UK and Italy more positively disposed towards stigmatised minorities such as refugees. ~ Hephzibah Anderson

In other days people chose a church on the basis of their doctrinal convictions. Now, lacking doctrinal convictions, they choose for social reasons. ~ Vance Havner

After macrobiotics, Zen, and channeling, the "poor Vanishing Indian" is once more the subject of "deep and meaningful conversation" in the high rises. ~ Mary Brave Bird

Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize. ~ Oliver Stone

Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable - from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems. ~ Vinod Khosla

China is not a superpower, nor will she ever seek to be one ... If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should identify her as social-imperialist, expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it. ~ Deng Xiaoping

National and regional governments were committing vast resources into combating the biosphere breakdown. Social welfare, infrastructure administration, health care, and security - the fields government used to devote its efforts to - were all slowly being starved of tax money and sold off to private industry. It ~ Peter F. Hamilton

My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero. ~ Nell Zink

For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself. ~ Thomas Mann

Maintain social distancing and wash your hands frequently with soap and water, until the WHO lifts the global emergency. And above all, do not share conspiracy theories on social media, because every single share makes it difficult for health-workers and other people working at the front to contain the situation. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I stood among the heaps of dead. They lay crumpled, useless, defunct. The vital force was fled. A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels and the substance had leaked out. The mystery of the universe had once inhabited these lolling lumps, had given each an identity, a way of walking, perhaps a social habit of address or a way with words or a knack of putting color on canvas. They had been so different, then. Now they were nothing, heaps of nothing. Can a bullet or a mortar fragment do this? Does this force, this mystery, I mean this soul--does this spill out on the ground along with the blood? No. It is somewhere, I know it. ~ Robert Leckie

YEARS AGO I WORKED ON A GOVERNMENT TASK force studying fatherhood and healthy families. As we met in DC, I learned one of the main causes of the breakdown of the American family was the Industrial Revolution. When men left their homes and farms to work on assembly lines, they disconnected their sense of worth from the well-being of their wives and children and began to associate it with efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. While the Industrial Revolution served the world in terrific ways, it was also a mild tragedy in our social evolution. Raising healthy children became a woman's job. Food was no longer grown in the backyard, it was bought at a store with money earned from the necessary separation of the father. Within a few generations, then, intimacy in family relationships began to be monopolized by females. ~ Donald Miller

Maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. ~ Gloria Steinem

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness. ~ Aberjhani

...fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations:

-a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

-the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

-the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

-dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-the ~ Robert O. Paxton

Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be passed on. A 20-year-old man and woman will each pass on about 20 de novo mutations to a baby they conceive. By the time the couple is 40, a woman's total has remained at 20, while a man's has jumped to 65 - and it keeps climbing from there. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange. ~ Eric Fischl

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be. Mr. Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D wasn't anywhere in particular, it was just any convenient point a very long way from points A, B and C. He would have a nice little cottage at point D, with axes over the door, and spend a pleasant amount of time at point E, which would be the nearest pub to point D. His wife of course wanted climbing roses, but he wanted axes. He didn't know why - he just liked axes. He flushed hotly under the derisive grins of the bulldozer drivers. ~ Douglas Adams

That's why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance. If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.... If we lose this moment because we are thinking about something else, we've lost it forever. ~ Ani Tenzin Palmo

Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy. ~ Astra Taylor

Markets are free when human beings have equal opportunities to influence the production and trade of desirable goods and services... Some people attain market control and set market prices due to favourable natural, social or political conditions: They attain a monopoly. The problem with monopolies is that they enable those who have attained them to extract money from society without providing goods or services of corresponding value. Apart from abolute monopolies, monopolies can also occur when the market is simply closed to new participants because overall supply can't be increased; these are known as entry monopolies. ~ Martin Adams