Superiority

Famous quotes containing the word superiority:

    “Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every bit as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.... this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.”
    —Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, African American civil rights organization. SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement)

    “Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body’s yoke, but is subject to that of society.”
    —Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

    “Obscurantism is the academic theorist’s revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity—a way of proclaiming one’s superiority in the face of one’s diminished influence.”
    —David Lehman (b. 1948)