Quotes About Social Climbing

Introduced and tabled for more comprehensive discussion at future meetings were such topics as the art of fund-raising, the art of the deal, the artistry of publicity, the art of social climbing, the art of fashion designing, the art of the costume, the art of catering, and the art of conducting without dissension and bringing to a close on time a meeting lasting two hours that was pleasant, uneventful, unsurprising, and unnecessary.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

La costumbre de saltarse posiciones en la lista estaba tan extendida que la mayoría de los moscovitas creían que nadie podía llegar al primer puesto limitándose a esperar. Un

La gente cree que lo importante es tener éxito, ganar prestigio, conseguir poder, subir por la escala social, servir a la máquina, pero la persona queda estancada. En realidad, más que estancada, empeora ligeramente. Cumplidos los 25 años, ya no se perfeccionan, sino que degeneran, aunque mejoren en el arte de ganar dinero y manipular a los demás. (...) El arte de escuchar

Ida Alice seemed determined to run through Flagler's money, gathering an expensive wardrobe and trying to buy her way into New York high society.

The best way to rise in society is to use all possible means of persuading people that one has already risen in society.

My first drag role was the character Widow Simone in the ballet 'La Fille Mal Gardee.' She's a crazy social climbing woman trying to marry off her daughter to the wealthy town idiot. And in the middle of the show, she gets to perform a clog dance. I loved it.

Siempre odié lo que define la vida en ese lugar: el arribismo, el afán de figurar, el odio, la tacañería congénita. la envidia

Social climbing and power climbing -- the two are often synonymous -- are what make Washington run. ... If there are more than two people together, if there are three, one of them is climbing.

Steerpike was, of course, alive with ideas and projects. These two half-witted women were a gift. That they should be the sisters of Lord Sepulchrave was of tremendous strategic value. They would prove an advance on the Prunesquallors, if not intellectually at any rate socially, and that at the moment was what mattered. And in any case, the lower the mentality of his employers the more scope for his own projects.

It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew's true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual.

In affluent communities, where each member is keenly aware of his or her place within the Byzantine order, attracting the right friends is a blood sport. Chumming up to influential figures who are in a position to help can determine the course of an entire life.

I discovered that social climbing was a middle-class phenomenon, the poor never gave it a thought, they were too busy trying to survive. Over the years these communities acquired political savvy, they organized and became fertile territory for leftist parties. Ten years later, in 1970, they were decisive in electing Salvador Allende and for that reason had to suffer the greatest repression during the dictatorship.

I've never really understood people who climb socially by sucking up. It seems like the least efficient way to climb, and also the most psychologically debilitating.

Good morning, Lord Vickery, she [Lady Elizabeth Scarlet] said. "The early fortune hunter catches the heiress, eh?

She might have been a for­tune hunter, you know. Not an es­pe­cially good one. War­ren laughed. I have no for­tune. But you will one day. Daniel shook his head. It's never too soon to take pre­cau­tions. Ah yes. Lord save me from lovely young women.

Mr. Stryver, a man of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life.

parvenus, relied on money of questionable antecedents

My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn't a patch on my sister. It wasn't much fun growing up with her and her almost irrational social climbing in that huge house of my dull stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss in Washington.

The whole key to social climbing is not having spinach in your teeth.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

ABOUT thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton,* and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady,* with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All

On all the 'Housewives' shows, there's always some wannabe wife who's always sticking her head in.