George Jean Nathan Quotes

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

The great families have their privileges.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

Language does not make one an elite.

'Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

In my position, I could be a debutante. But we only got to this position by being a politically active family.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.

To their entertainments princes invite only the nobility; but when they meet with misfortune, they invite also citizens.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.