Class Anxiety Quotes

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

I think it's part of being English, particularly if you are middle-class - you're always looking to be reminded that you are no good and you are always actually embarrassed about being successful.

I think of myself as being a bit of a wimp deep down - a bourgeois wimp - and I'm fighting that. I think all Brits are, maybe.

It's so easy for anyone to deal with their own guilt of being a middle-class white music fan by pointing to other people who they perceive to be richer than them, whiter than them.

I don't think old posh is as intimidating as new posh, is it?

At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn't dare to ask what they meant. I left university and went to work in the Post.

The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era's more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too.

I've got to be high class... Which is sad, because I like bars.

I was just painfully shy. I couldn't talk to anyone. Going up in front of class, I would have to mentally prepare myself to raise my hand.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

I have many times marveled at how I could feel so good about myself while eating peanuts in a middle seat on Southwest Airlines and yet feel so condescended to in first class on United.

I have my cards read every time I pass a tarot-reader booth. I would be so embarrassed to have one of those 900 numbers appear on my phone bill, because I don't know how I would explain it to my business manager. It would almost be like saying, 'Okay, I'm white trash.'

When you grow up middle class, you just always feel like you've got to be working, or you won't be able to pay the bills.

At one point in college I was so shy that I'd drop out of a class if asked to speak in front of other people.

She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.

There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humors of a country christening, and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as the quality of Brentford.

In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself.

Whenever I wear something expensive it looks stolen.

There's a particularly British wariness of appearing to try too hard. It's somehow distasteful. Everything should come to us seamlessly and, if you have to work at it, you're somehow a loser.

I'd always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting. I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.