Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Clothes were terribly important in the '20s. They really were an arbiter of who you were and how much money you had: an indicator of social status.

There was a time when formal clothes were one of life's great pleasures, as well as a way of describing instantly a man's status wealth. Toffs wore the most, the proles the least. Fast forward to 2008 and clothes are still an unrivalled pleasure but some men - and this includes many of our betters - have confused status with fake informality.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

My people are poor and I am one of them.

In the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

When I was a child, I didn't fly - we couldn't afford to fly. Flying was for rich people.

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

My parents worked their tails off, but we weren't the poorest people in town. Some people I went to school with, you could tell they were dirt poor.

I've never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.

Perhaps they do not recognize themselves, for a rich man is even harder to define than a poor one.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor.

Money doesn't buy class.

Class is more important than a game.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

The level of real income is not what determines whether they are happy or not. It’s their relative place in the pecking order.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.

The day I stopped drinking milk' is a very sensitive story telling the tale of how we forget what is 'normal' for us falls under the category of 'expensive' or 'unaffordable' for middle or poor class.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?

The best by far is to marry in one's own rank.

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.