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Inferiority Quotes

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Inferiority Quotes

“[Patricia Highsmith] had experienced at first hand many of Ripley's characteristics - splintered identity, insecurity, inferiority, obsession with an object of adoration, and the violence that springs from repression. Like her young anti-hero, she knew that in order to survive, it was necessary to prop oneself up with a psychological fantasy of one's own making. 'Happiness, for me, is a matter of imagination,' she wrote in her notebook while writing The Talented Mr. Ripley. 'Existence is a matter of unconscious elimination of negative and pessimistic thinking. I mean, to survive at all. And this applies to everyone. We are all suicides under the skin, and under the surface of our lives.”

WritingHappinessImaginationExistenceFantasyViolenceIdentitySurvivalNegativeSuicideSurfaceObsessionUnconsciousInsecurityPessimismAdorationRepressionInferiorityPessimisticSurviveAnti HeroSplintered Identity
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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“The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame: and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview.”

WomenShameInferiorityChaste
Book:Oliver Twist
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“It [anger] presents itself as a huge umbrella that shields other emotions such as frustration, confusion, embarrassment, lack, insecurity, inferiority, violation, resentment, sadness, and guilt. There is always a root to the real issue that you are too afraid to step into a vulnerable space and address.”

SadnessAngerGuiltConfusionFrustrationInsecurityResentmentEmbarrassmentInferiorityLack
Book:Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism
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“Superiority complex does not mean "pride" although it appears to be so in the eyes of those who want to see it so. When you feel a higher esteem over the obstacles you desire to surmount, you highly overcome them and can still count a reserved energy to spare!”

DesireEnergyPowerfulPowerPrideProudVictoryHigherFood For ThoughtAverageIsraelmore AyivorObstaclesEsteemConquerWinnerEyesEmpoweredFeelHighReservedInferioritySeeConquerorOvercomeComplexSupermanVictorAbove AverageSuperiorSuperiority ComplexInferiorAppearsSpareEnergizeSuperHighlyBelow AveragePair Of EyesCome OverHigher HighestHighly OvercomeSurmountTo Spare
Book:The Great Hand Book of Quotes
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“Annabelle and I ate mussels on the back deck and drank beers until we were toasted. Laughed our asses off remembering these people in our classes and those stupid parties where literary people try so hard to be literary people. Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity. 'Every time I see people in social circumstances like that, I can't help but imagine them in junior high, worrying about who they're going to eat lunch with,' Annabelle had said, and I always thought about that later. You see a person's inner thirteen-year-old and you won't look at them the same way again.”

CompassionSelf EsteemSuperiorityRelatableInferioritySelf Insight
Book:Stay
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“We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.”

SuccessDemocracyGreatnessAchievementAmbitionGloryIdealsPerfectionEssenceEqualityJealousyMediocrityHeroesInferiorityIntimidationEgalitarianismPettinessOverachievers
Book:The Volcano Lover
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“And she got the feeling that Boots Smith's relationship to this swiftly moving car was no ordinary one. He wasn't just a black man driving a car at a pell-mell pace. He had lost all sense of time and space as the car plunged forward into the cold, white night. The act of driving the car made him feel he was a powerful being who could conquer the world. Up over hills, fast down on the other side. It was like playing god and commanding everything within hearing to awaken and listen to him. The people sleeping in the white farmhouses were at the mercy of the sound of his engine roaring past in the night. It brought them half-awake—disturbed, uneasy. The cattle in the barns moved in protest, the chickens stirred on their roosts and before any of them could analyze the sound that had alarmed them, he was gone—on and on into the night. And she knew, too, that this was the reason white people turned scornfully to look at Negroes who swooped past them on the highways. 'Crazy niggers with autos' in the way they looked. Because they sensed that the black men had to roar past them, had for a brief moment to feel equal, feel superior; had to take reckless chances going around curves, passing on hills, so that they would be better able to face a world that took pains to make them feel that they didn't belong, that they were inferior. Because in that one moment of passing a white man in a car they could feel good and the good feeling would last long enough so that they could hold their heads up the next day and the day after that. And the white people in the cars hated it because—and her mind stumbled over the thought and then went on—because possibly they, too, needed to go on feeling superior. Because if they didn't, it upset the delicate balance of the world they moved in when they could see for themselves that a black man in a ratclap car could overtake and pass them on a hill. Because if there was nothing left for them but that business of feeling superior to black people, and that was taken away even for the split second of one car going ahead of another, it left them with nothing.”

MenDrivingDriversSuperiorityAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsInferiorityBlack Men
Book:The Street
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“A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.... If men occupy superior positions, it's a short leap to the idea that men must be superior...[and that] whatever men do will tend to be seen as having greater value.”

MenWomenPrivilegeOppressionSuperiorityPatriarchyInferiority
Book:The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
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“Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.”

MenLifeWomenImaginationSuperiorityInferiority
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.”

MenWomenRelationshipsMarriagePrivilegeInferiorityPrestigeSerfdomMen Dream
Author:Simone de Beauvoir
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“The Scholars "Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end; Wear out the carpet with their shoes Earning respect; have no strange friend; If they have sinned nobody knows. Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way?”

WritingAgePoetryPerfectionCriticismCriticsFrustrationCreative ProcessInferiorityLove PoetryEruditionScholarsAnnotation
Book:The Wild Swans at Coole
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“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.”

AcceptanceRacismSuperiorityAfrican AmericansRace RelationsInferiorityWhite People
Book:The Fire Next Time
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“10. Comparison is the root of all feelings of inferiority. The moment you begin examining other people’s strengths against your most obvious weaknesses, your self-esteem starts to crumble!”

FeelingsSelf EsteemObviousComparisonYouMomentInferiorityExaminingTheToIsMostAllOfBeginYourOtherAgainstRootWeaknessesStrengthsCrumbleStartsPeople S
Book:Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
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“This is the ultimate tragedy of segregation. It not only harms one physically but injures one spiritually. It scars the soul and degrades the personality. It inflicts the segregated with a false sense of inferiority, while confirming the segregator in a false estimate of his own superiority.”

RacePsychologySuperiorityAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsInferiorityWhites
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.”

HappinessFearPeaceEqualityCensorshipInferiorityRay BradburyFahrenheit 451
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“My method is atheism. I find the atheistic outlook provides a favourable background for cosmopolitan practices. Acceptance of atheism at once pulls down caste and religious barriers between man and man. There is no longer a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian. All are human beings. Further, the atheistic outlook puts man on his legs. There is neither divine will nor fate to control his actions. The release of free will awakens Harijans [lowest caste] and the depressed classes from the stupor of inferiority into which they were pressed all these ages when they were made to believe that they were fated to be untouchables. So I find the atheistic outlook helpful for my work [helping people]. After all it is man that created god to make society moral and to silence restless inquisitiveness about the how and why of natural phenomena. Of course god was useful though a falsehood. But like all falsehoods, belief in god also gave rise to many evils in course of time and today it is not only useless but harmful to human progress. So I take to the propagation of atheism as an aid to my work. The results justify my choice.”

HumanityBeliefNatureFateProgressAtheismMoralityIslamAtheistEqualityUselessControlMaterialismFree WillHinduismQuestionsMuslimInferiorityAtheisticNaturalismSocial ReformerHinduUntouchablesCaste SystemNatural PhenomenaHarmfulDivine WillAidCosmopolitanAtheistic OutlookMan Created GodReligious Barriers
Book:An Atheist with Gandhi
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“People with inferiority intentions do not go after their dreams not because they can't go; but because their passion is not strong enough to turn the wheels of success...and there they go, becoming losers, defeated by their obstacles!”

PeopleEnoughSuccessPassionStrongDreamsFood For ThoughtDefeatAverageIsraelmore AyivorObstaclesDefeatedInferiorityIntentionsLosersLowAbove AverageBelowLowerBelow Average
Book:The Great Hand Book of Quotes
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“There are human made laws and divine laws of nature, sometimes these laws coincide but not always. To paraphrase Saint Thomas Aquinas, any law that uplifts humankind, gives rein to other people expressing the profundity of life, and gives flight to their personality is just. Or as expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr., any law is unjust that distorts the soul, damages the personality of any person, bestows any group with a false sense of class superiority, or imposes upon any individual or oppressed group a segregated and false sense of inferiority.”

LawJusticePrejudiceOppressionSegregationLaws Of NatureInferiorityLawsUplifting QuotesNatural Laws
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“This indignation builds up an accumulation of anger over the many ways I am being reminded by the system then and now of my inferiority. This gradual anger over one humiliation after another may be hard for men to understand and even women who have not had the need to seek redress from perpetrators and who have been allowed to grow as I did in my youth unhindered, protected from male dominated themes like the military."47 (47 - paraphrased from Gurko, Miriram, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement, 1974.”

MilitaryAngerSexismWomen S RightsHumiliationInferioritySystemIndignationPatriarchalMale DominationLadies Of Seneca Falls
Book:Conduct Unbecoming: Rape, Torture, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Military Commanders
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“This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?”

PeopleWorldLifeReligionUniversePeaceNatureRaceMankindColorEqualRacismHumanGardenUnityEqualityGenderPeacefulBeastAnimalsRainbowFlowersSuperiorityDominationGardenerInferiorityEthnicityPlantsSuzy KassemCoexistenceCoexistSeedExistColors Of LifeRacialEthicCoexisting TogetherCoexistência
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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