Len Deighton Quotes

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.

I used to live in a street in Bristol which was, depending on your tabloid of choice, either Britain's most dangerous street or a moral cesspit. People made judgments about me on where I lived. It affected me - it affected my life chances. That is going on today with people in social housing. That, to me, isn't acceptable.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

I feel sometimes that there's this sense that people are poor because they want to be, or they're working-class because they want to be or because they don't work hard enough. I feel like there's this demonization of working people in general, but specifically definitely labor union members.

I think clever people think that poor people are stupid.

I think the class divide is going to change. I think a lot more working class people are going to get published. It is really class ridden, literature.

The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

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

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

Most people were annoyed with my voice, I think, because I'm working-class, and that doesn't sound quite right on Radio 4.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

I have a class prejudice - against the upper class, which is foolish.

The bias against the show is purely elitist. We're all like the people on the show - the difference is that some of us speak better, or were born richer. There's nothing that happens on my show that rich people don't experience.

Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.

Golf is elitist, it's stuffy, it's exclusive and I hate that because I am not that and I was never welcomed in and I'm still not welcomed in.

The evidence shows that grammar schools overwhelmingly benefit those from more affluent backgrounds.

I was at this fancy school, and I felt out of place, so I rebelled.

There has been a tendency only to deal with a certain social class when it comes to stories more than 100 years ago.

There's been a kind of inverse snobbery about culture. I get the feeling some people would look at Shakespeare and say, that's a bit too intimidating for working-class people.