superior quotes

For lawful power is still superior found, When long driven back, at length it stands the ground.

-John Dryden
Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.1, l.1024^5.

From his childhood onward this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score, and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliancewill follow, and the end of it all will bethattheCountry will be calledupontopay the bill.

- (James) Keir Hardie
  Speech in the House of Commons, 28  Jun, opposing an Address of Congratulation to the Queen being passed in the House of Commons, on the birth of a son (the future Edward VIII) to the Duke and Duchess ofYork.

I can scarcely fancy myself to ask a superior to publish a volume of my verse and I own that humanly there is very little likelihood of that ever coming to pass. And to be sure if I chose to look at things on one side and not the other I could of course regret this bitterly. But there is more peace and it isthe holier lot to be unknown than to be known.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
Letter to Richard Watson Dixon, 29 Oct. Collected in C C Abbott (ed)  The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (1935).

The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male.

-John Stuart Mill
  The Subjection of  Women, ch.4.

It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

- George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
  The Road to Wigan Pier, ch.2.

Amid the wreck and the misery of nations it is our just exaltation that we have continued superior to all that ambition or despotism could effect; and our still higher exaltation ought to be that we provide not only for our own safety but hold out a prospect for nations now bending under the yoke of tyranny of what the exertions of a free people can effect.

-William known as  theYounger Pitt
  Speech to the House of Commons, 25 Apr.

Justice is superior to injustice. 655

-Plato
Republic, bk.1, 367b (translated by P Shorey,1953).

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

- George Bernard Shaw
  Man and Superman,'Maxims for Revolutionists:Titles'.

Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectableasthe Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.

- Robert Louis Stevenson
  An InlandVoyage,'At Maubeuge'.

Most people are relieved to find a superior on whose judgment they can rest. That, indeed, is the difference between most people and Generals.

- BarbaraW(ertheim) Tuchman
  Address at US ArmyWar College, Apr. Collected in Practising History (1981).

It isthespirit of theageto believethat any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

- Gore originally Eugene Luther Vidal,Jr Vidal
  'French Letters:Theories of the New Novel', in Encounter, Dec.