Top 100 Quotes About Snobbery
#1. As royalty, celebrities and the rich have always known, a smile is the most subtle and satisfying way of shitting on the inferior.
Michael Foley
#2. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
Marilynne Robinson
#3. Snobbery is the pride of those who are not sure of their position.
Berton Braley
#4. There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.
Gordon Ramsay
#6. All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.
Louis MacNeice
#7. I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.
J. Rufus Fears
#8. Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
Alexander Theroux
#9. Class amusements, be they for Dukes or plow-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still, more or less sociable and universal; There's a place for every man who will come and take his part.
Thomas Hughes
#10. There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.
Stephen Fry
#11. There's no snobbery or resentment from serious polo people towards those who just come for the party.
Kate Reardon
#13. I have been to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street but cannot get on the BBC. I am very disappointed because it boils down to snobbery.
Phil Taylor
#14. If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.
Criss Jami
#15. All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another.
Donna Tartt
#16. In the snobbery of science, each branch attempts to rise in the social scale by imitating the methods of the next higher science and by ignoring the methods and phenomena of the sciences beneath.
Gilbert Newton Lewis
#17. I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
Susan Sontag
#18. It was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. 'Because you are not cute, I do not want to know you' was, to me, hardly different from suggesting 'because you are gay, I dislike you
Stephen Fry
#19. But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.
Arthur Phillips
#20. Questions, Hypothetical: Needn't be answered. No one knows why.
Schools, Public: They teach you to stand on your own two feet. 'No doors on the lavatories. That sorts the men from the boys'.
Snobbery, Inverted: The worst kind. No need to explain why.
William Donaldson
#21. That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
Bertrand Russell
#22. [Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.
Joseph Epstein
#23. I've found there to be a tremendous amount of East Coast snobbery in the journalism world.
Diane Lane
#24. The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter.
Miriam Toews
#25. Snobbery management is as difficult and necessary as anger management.
Michael Foley
#26. There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.
Robbie Williams
#27. We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
Criss Jami
#28. Although the rudiments of snobbery are there, its finer developments are basically alien to the Australian soul - that is, if Australians have a soul; many people believe that they are too matter-of-fact and down-to-earth to have such fancy commodities.
George Mikes
#29. The Monarchy ... is the secret well from which the flourishing institution of British Snobbery draws its nourishment
Kingsley Martin
#30. Udden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it's like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.
Ben Aaronovitch
#31. Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility ... youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.
C.S. Lewis
#32. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
#33. It's the worst sort of snobbery to condemn a book without reading it, merely because it's popular.
Rose Lerner
#34. All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
#35. What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Alain De Botton
#37. The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
Roger Scruton
#39. I don't believe in any kind of artistic snobbery or musical snobbery. You know, to me, the sexiest and the most spiritual words ever uttered in rock and roll are wop babaloo balop bam boom.
Sinead O'Connor
#40. Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings.
Cary Grant
#41. We learned pretty early on in this band that you can't have snobbery in music.
Mike Shinoda
#42. To sneer at his imperfect attempt was very bad breeding.
Emily Bronte
#43. It can be so difficult to train up the peasants," she said, pretending to commiserate, her voice heavy with irony. "They find it so hard to project the kind of snobbery that comes so naturally to their betters.
Caitlin Crews
#44. The derision comes from snobbery, which I think is the worst thing for art and music. I don't think there's any place for it and it comes from insecurity.
Theo Hutchcraft
#45. The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Alan Bennett
#46. Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.
Robert Lane Greene
#47. [General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary.
Russell S. Bonds
#48. For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#49. Don't get me wrong - intellectual snobbery is vulgar and gauche.
Robert Webb
#50. Snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things.
Charles Dudley Warner
#51. The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won't find it because it is beneath them.
D.E. Navarro
#52. The bus was crowded, standing room only, and he clung apelike from a bar that hung down from the ceiling. It was humiliating to be packed in with all these people; it reminded him of a cattle car or worse, a sardine can, or worse...but what could be worse than this?
Joseph G. Peterson
#53. As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.)
Martin Amis
#54. It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Albert Camus
#55. High standards generally
about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else
far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.
Joseph Epstein
#56. No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people Shouldn't have to apologize for being poor. The question in America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?
Kurt Vonnegut
#57. My mum especially listens to music in a way that is incredibly feelings-based. There's virtually no snobbery about what sounds are in it, she just wants to hear a song and that is quite refreshing.
James Blake
#59. There is a little bit of snobbery with casting, and unless you're a really successful comedian like Ruth Jones, you don't get to be in the drama side of things.
Rhys Thomas
#60. Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.
John Cleese
#61. Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors....
Charlotte MacLeod
#62. And I know what it is that's going to destroy the world. Lack of communication - reciprocal communication: cultural, political, intellectual - whatever you like. But more, it's snobbery and self-deceit, which are artificial, protective barriers that prevent communication.
Angus Stewart
#63. Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.
Alex Kapranos
#65. I stay subjective because that's what I do. That's one of my abilities. I don't need to watch it because I've had the adventure. I don't do low-budget acting. I do the same acting, whether I'm in a Jim Cameron or not. I always try to do good work. There's no snobbery in there
Lance Henriksen
#66. There is a middlebrow snobbery in America that praises everything on public television and disdains everything on the commercial networks as a blight.
Henry Fairlie
#67. One of the nice things about a favorite pop song is that it's an unconditional truce on judgment and musical snobbery. You like the song because you just do, and there need not be any further criticism.
Henry Rollins
#68. Why do you like Hugh better? Because he is a Viscount?'
'Well, that's one reason,' I admitted, without any false shame. Respect for degree was in my blood and I didn't think of it as snobbery.
L.P. Hartley
#69. A pleasantly situated hotel close to the sea, and chalets by the water's edge where one breakfasted. Clientele well-to-do, and although I count myself no snob I cannot abide paper bags and orange peel. ("Not After Midnight")
Daphne Du Maurier
#71. Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
#72. Confidence is good, but when they hold their heads high like that, it just makes them look cocky and snobbish.
Grace Fiorre
#73. You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old.
Alexandre Dumas
#74. There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity.
Henry Ford
#75. I always tell the fans, 'Screw it! Like what you like. Listen to what you want.' Insisting that one type of music is better than the next is snobbery, and I have no time for that. Check out all the music that's out there. There's great stuff you're probably missing.
Corey Taylor
#76. Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about
Edward St. Aubyn
#77. Music was segregated in the '80s, and then in the '90s the boundaries started to break down, and rock kids got into electronic music. But then you got this reverse snobbery where people would only listen to electronic music and not rock.
Thomas Bangalter
#78. Music should always be polarizing. What one person likes, somebody else hates. And I hate that kind of snobbery in pop music. The fact that so many people are getting upset over this one song is hysterical. And if people like it, that's great.
Simon Cowell
#79. English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#80. The worst form of snobbery is to deny information; to anyone at all. Always remember that. Bas as it is to look down on another human being: to act as censor? Unforgivable.
Matthew Blakstad
#81. I think snobbery is one of the oldest customs in the world, and the rich will always find ways to rank each other and make themselves feel more special than others.
Kevin Kwan
#82. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
G.K. Chesterton
#83. This is the snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT!
Mitchell Kapor
#84. My theory was that if you spent such a big portion of your life being a snob, you were not allowed to be surprised when people start wishing you dead.
Chrissy Moon
#85. In TV, film, and music there's a lot of snobbery, and I don't like it. I've never been a cultural snob.
Simon Cowell
#86. Mmm, being irresistibly likeable is such a trial,' she drawled in an impeccable aristocratic whine. 'One is constantly in demand, but one must do one's duty, mustn't one, dear chap? Noblesse oblige and all that ...
Susan Napier
#87. 'Venti caramel macchiato, please,' he said. 'Hold the snobbery.'
The barista laughed and hit buttons on his register. 'You sure? We're having a sale on social mobility. The longer your coffee order takes to place, the more you have to pay.'
'Perfect. Reverse consumerism.'
S.W. Vaughn
#88. There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.
Norman Foster
#89. The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can't reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.
Matt Haig
#91. Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.
Arthur Koestler
#92. We had enough quite enough snobbery in this world without exporting it to the hereafter.
Rick Riordan
#93. A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.
A.P. Herbert
#94. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
Freeman Dyson
#95. I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.
Kahlil Gibran
#96. Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.
Irvine Welsh
#97. Increasingly, to dismiss any popular artistic style is seen as the worst kind of snobbery. And snobbery, it goes without saying, is unacceptable in a diverse and democratic world.
Russell Smith
#98. ...and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery.
Steven Moore
#99. I deeply detest social distinction and snobbery, and in that lies my strong aversion to titular honours.
Helen Clark
#100. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
C.S. Lewis
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