Byour skill in Mechanism, it has cometo pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure mortal nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.

-Carlyle,Thomas
  Signs of the Times.

The man who offers a bribe gives awaya little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has just paid for a woman.

-Greene, (Henry) Graham
  The Comedians, pt.1, ch.4.

Your great glory is not to be inferior to what you have been given by nature, and the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether theyare praising or criticizing you.

-Pericles
Address to women in the Funerary Oration. Quoted in Thucydides History of the PeloponnesianWar, 2.45.2 (translated by R Warner,1961).

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

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

   I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

-Smith, Rev Sydney
  Letter to Lord Holland, [August]. In The Letters of Sydney Smith edited by Nowell C Smith (1953), vol.1.