Social Class Quotes

The Secretary, working in the Dismal Swamp betimes next morning, was informed that a youth waited in the hall who gave the name of Sloppy. The footman who communicated this intelligence made a decent pause before uttering the name, to express that it was forced on his reluctance by the youth in question, and that if the youth had had the good sense and good taste to inherit some other name it would have spared the feelings of him the bearer.

When asked what was the proper time for supper: If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them. But it's difficult to know where to start; we've all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I've grown away from most working-class people.

A working class hero is something to be.

My feelings, gratitude, for instance, are denied me simply because of my social position.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Discuss unto me: art thou officer, Or art thou base, common, and popular?

The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.

He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.

The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine

Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man.

I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.

Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.

Nobody wants to be called common people, especially common people.

Rebukes are easy from our betters,From men of quality and letters;But when low dunces will affront,What man alive can stand the brunt?

Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.

If we were second class citizens we'd be driving old Cadillacs and living good. If we were first class we'd be driving a Rolls Royce.

I make shoes for white suburban kids, not the poor black kids. That would be like opening a restaurant for people without stomachs.

A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but anobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.

There's nothing like white trash at the White House.

I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the Quality of this land.

I want to get totally rid of class distinction. As someone put it one of the papers this morning: Marks and Spencer have triumphed over Karl Marx and Engels.

I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination.

Speak, what trade art thou?Why, sir, a carpenter.Where is thy leather apron and thy rule?What does thou with thy best apparel on?

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

One wants recovery to start from the bottom, and the other wants it to start from the top. I don't know which is right. I've never heard of anybody suggesting that they might start it in the middle, so I hereby make that suggestion. To start recovery halfway between the two, because it's the middle class that does everything anyhow. But I don't know anything about it.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Come hither, all ye empty things,Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings;Who float upon the tide of state,Come hither, and behold your fate.Let pride be taught by this rebuke,How very mean a thing's a Duke;From all his ill-got honours flung,Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.

I'm with an old family" was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury [Massachusetts] that you couldn't even understand them.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.

Good company requires only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice. Birth and good manners are essential; but a little learning is by no means a dangerous thing in good company; on the contrary, it will do very well.

If you want to be equal with me, you can get your own Rolls-Royce, your own house and your own million dollars.

It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the noble families.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

The privileges of the side-table included the small prerogatives of sitting next to the toast, and taking two cups of tea to other people's one.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.

Education gives sobriety to the young, comfort to the old, riches to the poor and is an ornament to the rich.

Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is not to be feared.

It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

I am much nearer to creating one nation than Labour will ever be. Socialism is two nations. The privileged rulers, and everyone else. And it always gets to that. What I am desperately trying to do is create one nation with everyone being a man of property, or having the opportunity to be a man of property.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

People like us don't go out at night cause people like them see us for what we are

The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.