Class Perception Quotes

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

People assume that I'm an aristocrat, but I don't really feel part of any class.

I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.

People assume I'm posh because I'm one of the acting dames. I grew up in Tottenham and didn't used to speak like I do now.

I don't think you can get any more working class than me. Everyone seems posh to me.

You meet a better class of person in pubs.

I think people tend to underestimate you when you have a Northern accent, for instance if you have to talk to the CEO of an international company. But then when I'm talking to someone in a factory, it's just like being with my mum's mates.

Class is an intangible quality which commands, rather than demands, the respect of others.

One of the reasons I got really fat when I left home was because I thought rich people ate white bread and Spam. I also thought they could get processed meals, because we never did, so that was exciting.

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist - all good.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

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.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

Technology is not going to be perceived by different classes of people in the same way.

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

Not that I am hugely working class, but in the U.K. I'm always perceived, casting-wise, as being working class.

There is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS.

I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

Even if 'Bruises' had done a fraction of what it did, I would have thought that was class.

I am not posh. I went to a comprehensive school.

In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.

When I first started working on 'The Wood,' these people couldn't grasp the concept that, one, there is a black middle class, and, two, Inglewood is a part of it.

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.