Class Distinction Quotes

We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy,or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

In England, the class system is about a thousand years old, and it's not going to change any time soon.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman's education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.

God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.

Freedom doth with degree dispense.

Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador.

I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free laborers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish.

The wall between rich and poor is a wall of glass which all can see.

At acting school people didn't speak like me. It was all received pronunciation - 'ow now brown cow.'

In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.

The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.

In the West, it's just a given that art exists in this high-class place. But in Japan, there's no high class. The minute you come out, you're low class.

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.

I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.

Extravagance is the luxury of the poor; penury is the luxury of the rich.

Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes; Antiquity and birth are needless here; 'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

What is crime among the multitude is only vice among the few.

You can't get down and dirty at the opera.

In India, cast not class … is what counts most in popular life.

The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the Upper Classes, Have still the Upper Hand.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.