Social Elite Quotes

The Cliveden Set

You should pay special attention to … businessmen and moderately wealthy citizens. Get to know the leading members of these groups which should not be difficult as they are not great in number.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

Three hundred men, who all know each other direct the economic destinies of the Continent and they look for successors among their friends and relations. This is not the place to examine the strange causes of this strange state of affairs which throws a ray of light on the obscurity of our social future.

The obtuseness and cowardice of people of property and influence and the stupidity of most [military] officers, frustrated all efforts.

My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the '60s to the '80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.

Opera became popular in Texas the same way it did in a lot of previously isolated regions of the nation. It started with money. In the case of Texas, it was oil money, and it made a lot of people very rich, very fast.

Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.

… hundreds of gentlemen standing there with no other occupation than shaking the dust from their cigars.

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

Our hotel was full of legislators and volunteer officers, mostly planters or sons of planters, and almost without exception men of standing and property. South Carolina is an oligarchy in spirit, and allows no plebeians in high places.

It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don't feel like an oligarch.

I think back, when I saw The Great Gatsby, the film, my grandfather probably helped supply all the alcohol to all these Southampton parties, back then.

I had a period in my life, maybe a decade or so, in which I was involved in that kind of thing, associating with the elite of various segments of society. It always made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn't wait to get out of there and change my clothes. The good part about that was getting home and changing into my regular clothes. Taking off the suit and the tie, taking off the tight shoes, and just relaxing. Being away from that stuff. It was stimulating, but I never liked it. I always felt it was a terrible, terrible burden.

It was a different social structure. I'd go to [David] Bailey's for dinner at 10:30. There were always girls there and a house full of . . . I don't know, anybody. Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper . . . And there I am sitting down with these creatures of the 20th century, and it was normal to us.

Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.

There will always be ladies who lunch. Always. And apparently they live a long time.

There have been several Duchesses of Westminster but there is only one Chanel!

A White House dinner is the American family assembled, from labor leaders to billionaires, actors, architects, academicians and athletes.

High society is for those who have stopped working and no longer have anything important to do.

There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you'd owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.

The so-called oligarchs have always had less influence than conventional wisdom attributed to them.

As a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the officer corps of the old army became part of this class, as did that part of the younger generation who, in the old Germany, would have become officers or civil servants.

Her parents, Austin Taylor and Kathleen Taylor, were big deals in Vancouver - they were civic leaders, and he raced horses in the Kentucky Derby - and my mother grew up a debutante. And when she and my dad were married, there were about a thousand guests at that reception.

It is essential to rear a generation at the very top of society that has all the qualities needed to lead and give the people the inspiration and the drive to make it succeed. In short, the elite.. Every society tries to produce this type. The British have special schools for them: the gifted and talented are sent to Eton and Harrow.