Hugh Leonard Quotes

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

I don't like a class system. I don't like the idea of being in a different class than other people.

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

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people's minds in England.

We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

I'm reluctant to use the word class so much.

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

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

I don't like class distinction, and there is far too much of that in England.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.