181 Status Quotes

Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition.

Titles are marks of honest men, and wise; The fool or knave that wears a title lies.

Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.

I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

I could have been a Judge, but I never had the Latin for the judgin'. I never had it, so I'd had it, as far as being a judge was concerned... I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, O'er a' the ills o' life victorious.

The melancholy thing in our public life is the insane desire to get higher.

How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.

Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream.

The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

Money and goods are certainly the best of references.

In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.

None think the great unhappy but the great.

I've always liked Saturn. But I also have some sympathy for Pluto because I heard it's been downgraded from a planet, and I think it should remain a planet. Once you've given something planetary status it's kind of mean to take it away.

A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.

I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa?

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman 'other' or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet - big deal.

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

'Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.'

Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and rever persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.

Know your role and shut your mouth!

These reasonings are unconnected: 'I am richer than you, therefore I am better'; 'I am more eloquent than you, therefore I am better.' The connection is rather this: 'I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;' 'I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours.' But you, after all, are neither property nor style.(44)

The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a contempt for mere external show.

Son, only a pimp in a Louisiana whore house carries pearl handled revolvers, these are ivory.

I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded in another part,and some of his limbs gibbeted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town.

There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.

Cook: We have some breast of flamingo and gazelle steaks.

Vous etes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez!

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner; I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

never considered myself an outsider. But I definitely didn't consider myself an insider. (2006)

'Man, I promise I'm so self conscious/Thats why you always see me with at least one of my watches'

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

Our First Lady of letters.

Si, avons nous beau monter sur des echasses, car sur des echasses encore faut-il marcher de nos jambes. Et au plus eleve trone du monde, si ne sommes assis que sur notre cul.

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.

I'm not picking up dog shit. I'm a rock star.

As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across premieval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the familty circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be.

In sterculino plurimum gallus potest.

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Dol Bonner, to her employee Amy Duncan, chapter 2: Bosh. I find a rival - but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner - I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you...

I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.

Most 'scientists' are bottle washers and button sorters.

It is impossible for a man to be respectable enough to make a mistake respectable.

Nothing but falsehood needs the assistance of fame and place, of robes and mitres, of tiaras and crowns.

Nagorno Karabakh has de facto decided its case, however it should have been fixed during talks.

When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of 'to have become.' Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue? Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle.

And Tommy was, of course, Popular. As someone who had been Popular all her life, it had seemed written that [Sue] would meet and fall in love with someone as Popular as she.

'I am Stone Cold Steve Austin, I am the World Wrestling Federation Champion, and I do not deserve to be treated like this!'

I'm Okay!

If you hang out with a loser, you are a loser

'I look down from the top of this ladder and I see two jabronis, and from some of the places I've been, about a five dollar piece of ass!' - referring to Mikey Whipwreck, the Sandman, and Woman