Status Anxiety Quotes & Sayings

No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so. — Xenophon

Fascism's success almost always depends on the cooperation of the "losers" during a time of economic and technological change. The lower-middle classes - the people who have just enough to fear losing it - are the electoral shock troops of fascism (Richard Hofstadter identified this "status anxiety" as the source of Progressivism's quasi-fascist nature). Populist appeals to resentment against "fat cats," "international bankers," "economic royalists," and so on are the stock-in-trade of fascist demagogues. — Jonah Goldberg

Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. — Charlie Brooker

His subject is the "Origin of Species," & not the origin of Organization; & it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at all. — Harriet Martineau

Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one. — Alain De Botton

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there. — Jack Kornfield

To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous. — Soren Kierkegaard

-When I was growing up, Lieutenant Uhura was a major role model for me, a strong black woman on the bridge of a starship ...
-In a miniskirt, answering the interplanetary telephone? — Suzanne Brockmann

Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious. Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment. But instead of our fears lessening a well, they began to multiply in number. We started to worry about our status in society- whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, the future of our families and children, our personal health, and the aging process. Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. — Robert Greene

Orientation in time, space, and status are the essentials of social existence, and the Balinese, although they make very strong spirits for ceremonial occasions, with a few startling exceptions resist alcohol, because if one drinks one loses one's orientation. Orientation is felt as a protection rather than as a strait jacket and its loss provokes extreme anxiety. — Margaret Mead

I'm sick of girls who don't know how to high-five, — Aaron Sorkin

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be. — Alain De Botton

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority. — Nicolas Chamfort

In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

I want to get just as many people ready for Heaven as I can. Hell is a place where there is 'weeping and gnashing of teeth'; Heaven is a place of joy, happiness and no tears ... Being a soul winner is greater than being a preacher or a great doctor or a great dentist or a great businessman. Let's get people ready for Heaven. — Lee Roberson

Social Security is a tax. — Todd Akin

The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction. — Alain De Botton

A lady should never feel anxious about her behavior. The status is bred in the bone. To show anxiety is to lower oneself. Anxiety is vulgar. — Eloisa James

The rationale that etiquette should be eschewed because it fosters inequality does not ring true in a society that openly admits to a feverish interest in the comparative status-conveying qualities of sneakers. Manners are available to all, for free. — Judith Martin

The skeptical community is absolutely near and dear to the 'Mythbusters' heart and there's no small reason that they've embraced us. That's our people. That's the way we like to think. — Adam Savage

Frustration, despair, angst, anxiety, hurt, grief, unhappiness, envy, jealousy, and all the other painful emotions are catalysts of change in our lives. They motivate us to do things differently, to change our status quo. — Kate Levinson

Don't envy those who seems having everything, they don't really have everything. They have what they want and live the life they want but they don't have what they really need. — Ann Marie Aguilar

These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest. — Ian McEwan

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. — Alain De Botton

As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered. — Alain De Botton

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence. — Ayn Rand

My poor girl, you have not been very well taught how to make a home for your husband, but unless you mean with all your heart to strive to do it, you had better murder him than marry him - if you really love him. — Charles Dickens

Instead of trying to understand Life, we must live it. Create a reason to Live and progress on that path every day.-RVM — R.v.m.

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them. — Alain De Botton

Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles. — Paul Fussell

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

James Brown hid everything, and in the game of instant information he lost big-time, because the information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and stereotypes into fact with such ease and fluidity that after a while you get to believing as I do, that the media is not a reflection of the American culture but rather is teaching it. As long as James Brown was selling records he let that craziness run. He didn't care. The media worked in his favor and helped fuel his success. But it killed his public reputation and once the success was gone once the head disappeared, the body followed. — James McBride

TEN GUIDEPOSTS FOR WHOLEHEARTED LIVING 1. Cultivating authenticity: letting go of what people think 2. Cultivating self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism 3. Cultivating a resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness 4. Cultivating gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark 5. Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth 8. Cultivating calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle 9. Cultivating meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt and "supposed to" 10. Cultivating laughter, song, and dance: letting go of being cool and "always in control — Brene Brown