Hierarchy

"Men are divided into four classes: kings, raised up by their right to rule; viziers, distinguished by understanding and judgment; upper classes, raised up by affluence; and middle classes, linked with them by education. The rest of mankind are vanishing scum, floating refuse, vile men and women bound to meanness, whose only concern is to eat and to sleep." 

Ibn al-Faqīh, Mukhtaṣar Kitāb al-Buldān, quoted in Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, Bernard Lewis, Vol. II: Religion and Society

“The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.” 

George Orwell, 1984

"So work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom." 

The Archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V, Act 1, Scene 2. How very different modern archbishops are. 

"Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal." 

Nicolas Gomez Davila