Quotes About Class

You can't buy class, but you can buy tolerance for its absence.

Every reporter who sets off across the borders of class and culture should find such kind, candid, and wise guides.

Education, a force meant to erode class barriers, now fortifies them.

Authentic femininity is a combination of class, tenderness and virtue. When a woman possesses these traits, a man will naturally want to be more of a gentleman around her.

The other day I was shocked to come across, I think, the only remark of Bertrand Russell I have ever seen which seemed to me to betray an acute sense of class: 'There is, on the whole, much less liberty in the world now than there was a hundred years ago.' I have no measuring-rod for liberty, and do not know how to balance the lesser liberty of few against the greater liberty of many. But on any standard of measurement I can only regard the statement as fantastically untrue.

The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

mankind is not perfect, less perfect is womankind, and least perfect is that section of mankind which employs servants.

Each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind.

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.

Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been plain people and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The

Edith Wharton

I didn't know Countesses were so neighborly.

Pero, en primer lugar, Nueva York era una metrópolis perfectamente consciente de que en las grandes capitales no era bien visto llegar temprano a la ópera; y lo que era o no era bien visto jugaba un rol tan importante en la Nueva York de Newland Archer como los inescrutables y ancestrales seres terroríficos que habían dominado el destino de sus antepasados miles de años atrás.

Undine Spragg—how can you? her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid bell-boy had just brought in.

Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.

Los más tradicionales le tenían cariño precisamente por ser pequeña e incómoda, lo que alejaba a los nuevos ricos a quienes Nueva York empezaba a temer, aunque, al mismo tiempo, le simpatizaban.

Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, a gentleman couldn't go into politics. But

Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.

Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.

That Greiner house, now—a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he'll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before.

You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense, but your lungs are thinking about the air if you are not. And so it is with your rich people: they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!

Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals.

As for the accusation that he, Roosevelt, belonged to the landlord class, "if you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know that we do not have 'classes' at all on this side of the water.

Except for the two years he had lived with cowboys in North Dakota,and being the employer of a dozen or so servants,Roosevelt had never had to suffer any prolonged intimacy with the working class.From infancy,he had enjoyed the perquisites of money and social position.The money,through his own mismanagement,had often run short,and he was by no means wealthy even now, but he had always taken exclusivity for granted.