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.

A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might, Guid faith, he mauna fa' that.

Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.

The Pedigree of Honey Does not concern the Bee - A Clover, any time, to him, Is Aristocracy -

The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style

The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes.

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

King Louis XVI [prior to his arrest]: 'It's good to be the king. (Also used in Robin Hood- Men In Tights and The Producers [Musical])'

Envy aims very high.

I am like a Rolls Royce which can run without an engine, just on reputation.

To the intellectual the struggle for freedom is more vital than the actuality of a free society. He would rather 'work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it.' The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning - from minding other people's business - and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual. The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day. He wants a society throbbing with dedication, reverence, and worship. He sees it as scandalous that the discoveries of science and the feats of heroes should have as their denouement the comfort and affluence of common folk. A social order run by and for the people is to him a mindless organism motivated by sheer physiologism.

The two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son. ~ Ch. 2

The Rock is the most electrifying man in Sports Entertainment!

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

Know your role, Jabroni. Know your role.

'William Thomson: king of Victorian physics' by Mark McCartney in Physics World (1 December 2002)

Every time I get into an elevator, the operator says the same thing: 'Basement?'

I have a BMW. But only because BMW stands for Bob Marley and The Wailers, and not because I need an expensive car.

Michael Jackson is the King of Pop.

As shines the moon in clouded skies, She in her poor attire was seen; One praised her ankles, one her eyes, One her dark hair and lovesome mien. So sweet a face, such angel grace, In all that land had never been. Cophetua sware a royal oath: 'This beggar maid shall be my queen!'

Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Of me you shall not win renown: You thought to break a country heart For pastime, ere you went to town. At me you smiled, but unbeguiled I saw the snare, and I retired; The daughter of a hundred earls, You are not one to be desired.

A simple maiden in her flower Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.

Under which head do you class those who are at sea?

You don't have to be somebody 'cause being someone does not make you anybody anyways.

One of her instructors in fashion had given her to understand that curls were not the thing. 'They'll always pass muster,' Miss Dunstable had replied, 'when they are done up with bank notes.'

Of course there was a Great House at Allington. How otherwise should there have been a Small House?

For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.

A man in public life expects to be sneered at-it is the fault of his elevated sitiwation, and not of himself.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

In regione caecorum rex est luscus.

The Rock says, they didn't keep you at the bottom of the barrel just because you wanted to say goodbye to your roody poo friends in Madison Square Garden, no. The Rock says, they kept you at the bottom of the barrel because you absolutely suck.

'I got my pecs, I got limos, I got bitches, and all my limo's powered by bitch juice, and my spare pecs are in the limo.'

'The Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts-' 'That's nothing.' Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. 'That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.'

And in music, it's the great aphrodisiac that says that even though I'm short, fat, ugly, bald, and... and I'm hung like a second-grader, but if I'm in a rock band, I've got a better than average chance of bedding you down than if I was a dentist.

Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne, Entuned in hir nose ful semely, And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.

Men sholde wedden after hir estat, For youthe and elde is often at debat.

I, born in Essex thirty-four Essentially sexual years ago, Stepped down, looked around, and saw I had been cast a little low In the social register For the friends whom I now know. Is a constable a mister? Bob's your uncle, even so.

I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.

'You got to meet everyone - Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs.' People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to? Otherwise it sounds like I spent my life hustling around trying to meet people: 'Oh, look, there's the governor.'

Celebrity has always struck me as a dubious and transitory claim to achievement in our society. Status seekers and other so-called glitterati stand precariously on shifting sands, ever in danger of being swallowed up and then replaced by a fresh throng of famous or notorious stars.

'I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.'

He (the Emperor) is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders.

Is it not absurd when a human being tries to find happiness somewhere outside himself, and thinks that wealth and birth and the influence of friends: is of the utmost importance?

They [the Americans] equally detest the pageantry of a king, and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop.

: No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply). Flutter, flutter.

Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel): 'I'm wearing a cardboard belt!'

Michael Jackson is still the king of pop. He has not abdicated the throne, nor has he been usurped.

I need pity. I know what I feel. Great place and business in the world is not worth looking after.

I might have been on the outside looking in; at the bottom looking up. Now I'm on the outside, all right, but above, looking down. I don't need anything these people have to offer. What I need, they don't even care about. Some of them probably even have it, and are wasting it, losing it.

When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate. -- The Future of Industrial Man (1942)

'When did he cross that line from a person to a textile shrine?'

Richard Feynman became so exasperated [at the National Academy of Sciences] that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in.

He is a small man in search of a balcony.

With Bill Clinton in the hospital, that makes Al Gore acting former president.

My friend was of opinion that when a man of rank appeared in that character [as an author], he deserved to have his merit handsomely allowed.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch.

Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.

I can't see the sense in it [his honorary CBE] really. It makes me a Commander of the British Empire. They might as well make me a Commander of Milton Keynes - at least that exists.

No amount of status or reward will compensate for your inadequacy as a human being.

I was ne'er so thrummed since I was a gentleman.