Eddie Marsan Quotes

… modern civilization … enables us to cure sickness on a huge scale and to destroy each other on a huge scale. It enables us to liberate each other on a huge scale and to tyrannize each other on a huge scale…. There is no evidence of any continuous upward line of social progress

I think it's important to live as much of your life as possible in the real world. If you live a life that's limited to the Westside of Los Angeles, you're only going to see people like you.

The mean pattern of educational and economic achievement within multi-racial countries such as Canada and the United States has increasingly been found to prove valid internationally.

Greater inequality in Europe has made people less happy.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Class still matters in Britain today.

Washington is a great international city and in the congregation we have people who are rich and poor, black and white, and from every part of the world.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

The difference of the degrees in which the individuals of a great community enjoy the good things of life has been a theme of declaration and discontent in all ages.

Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I'd been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

The way everyone in London is right up against each other makes it very real to you growing up, the fact that people have different lives to you. And that causes problems; of course it does.

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

How can you compare the the masses of Western Europe with our people—so patient, so accustomed to privation?

Most Americans seem to be stuck in the economic strata to which they were born.

In the developed world, income inequality within the country is the most important determinant of health standards and life expectancy.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

For two years, I'd lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It's jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

I've been with all walks of life... All people from all status.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.