Quotes About Class

Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term 'middle class'. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say.)

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be flagrantly, shamelessly wrong.

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

Sometimes I think we parvenus are more protective of the social pecking order than the nobility.  I suppose it's born out of fear.

Books are always the best accessories to anything.

I used to make fun of the kids in school who acted or went to dance class.

I've never been in an acting class in my life.

Every director should take an acting class.

As far as I'm concerned, the best acting class is life.

I wasn't very good in my serious acting class. Sometimes people took our class so seriously, so I used to, sort of, make fun of people after class. And so a friend of mine said, 'Why don't you do the comedy thing.' That's how it all worked out.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

I like aristocracy. I like the beauty of aristocracy. I like the hierarchical feeling.

Something about the way I look screams 'aristocrat, 1940s.' It's so strange, because I'm not.

A woman who's light on her feet is always going to make the guy on her arm look better.

I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.

Well, then! there are streets, or ends of streets, there are houses, unknown for the most part to persons of social distinction, to which a woman of that class cannot go without causing cruel and very wounding things to be thought of her. Whether the woman be rich and has a carriage, whether she is on foot, or is disguised, if she enters one of these Parisian defiles at any hour of the day, she compromises her reputation as a virtuous woman.

As a general rule, confidences are made to persons below one socially rather than to those above. Much more readily than we can employ our superiors in secret affairs, we make use of our inferiors, who consequently become

Man sieht, daß sich in allen Schichten der Gesellschaft die Bräuche gleichen und nur in der Art, dem Äußerlichen und der Nuance verschieden sind. Auch die große Gesellschaft hat ihr Rotwelsch; aber dieses Rotwelsch heißt ›der Stil‹.

mere boy, who dances badly; besides, he has no fortune. And, after all, papa, none of these people have titles. I want, at least, to be a countess like my mother.

Estos dos jóvenes juzgaban a la sociedad desde tanta más altura cuanto más abajo se encontraban situados en la escala social, ya que los hombres desconocidos se vengan de lo modesto de su posición con su elevación de miras.

En las alturas, la Nobleza y el Poder; abajo, el Comercio y el Dinero; dos esferas sociales que en todas partes son perpetuamente enemigas; por ello es difícil adivinar cuál de las dos ciudades odiaba más a su rival.

You know what I have noticed? And this is really sad. Flying first class is less scary than flying coach. They speak to you and they're so nice to you and they want to help you and they know you want a drink before the plane takes off. And they bring it to you without asking. If you're sitting in coach and hoping for a drink, good luck.

A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, be different from the same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.