Hierarchy quotes
101 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people."
"The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy."
"Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas."
"All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob."
"The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside hierarchy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom."
"An atom is a hierarchy of different states of information that define the statistical likelihood of finding a particle here or there at the time of observation."
"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values."
"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"
"The flatter the corporate hierarchy, the more likely it is that employees will communicate bad news and act upon it."
"If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all."
"O latest born and loveliest vision far of all Olympus' faded hierarchy."
"In the old systems, hierarchies emanate power from above to below through forms of line management and are ideologically supported by cosmologies and theologies featuring celestial rulers and their deputies - the 'rule of the best.'"
"Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy."
"We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another."
"There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment."
"Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness."
"If you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio - it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again."
"Generals often find a way of dealing with generals on the officer-to-officer level. In the hierarchy of the military and with the almost similar structure and similar language, they find a way of dealing with each other."
