Top 100 Quotes About The Upper Class
#1. Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.
Ed Miliband
#2. We are in the more blessed category, the upper class who lived by faith and believed even though we hadn't seen!
David Berg
#3. A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth.
Christopher Hitchens
#4. All hail that bane of the upper class, a scene. The spectre of being publicly shamed
Marie Brennan
#5. The house seemed almost without smells at all, pleasant or foul, leaving me to wonder if the upper class existed on a different sort of air from the rest of the world, a breeze piped into their homes from above the clouds, so clean you had to pay for it.
Ami McKay
#6. When I first left drama school, I was too posh for the working-class parts and not posh enough for the upper-class roles. You know what England is like: the gradations of accent and how you're judged by them are still there. I discovered that to get a break you have to lie about where you're from.
Ben Chaplin
#7. What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass
August Strindberg
#8. The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
George Orwell
#9. A broad definition of crime in England is that it is any lower-class activity that is displeasing to the upper class.
David Frost
#10. Many of the officials, courtiers, and priests, representing the upper class of Egyptian society but not the royalty, looked strikingly like modern Europeans, especially long-headed ones
Carleton S. Coon
#11. Everything is always grungy in England, no? It's like a little shibboleth of the upper class, wearing something out of your grandfather's trunk.
Leon Max
#12. If they had won, all they'd have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he's wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans - the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn't have permitted it." Juliana thought, Spoken like a devout Fascist.
Philip K. Dick
#13. Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.
Maureen Corrigan
#14. Tomorrow everybody - or practically everybody - will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.
Peter Drucker
#15. I would not say that George Bush doesn't care about people at all. I think that his loyalties are to the upper class.
Stephanie Tubbs Jones
#16. The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
Tracey Ullman
#17. You don't understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana, "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Whittaker Chambers
#18. Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.
Joseph Campbell
#19. Politics in Bolivia must combine social consciousness with professional competency. In my administration, intellectuals from the upper class can be cabinet ministers or ambassadors, as can members of Indian ethnic groups.
Evo Morales
#20. Though we are perpetually bragging of it [the middle class] as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper class.
Charles Dickens
#21. Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.
Jeff Koons
#22. For somebody in my neighborhood to aspire or revere a person from the upper class, that is the most ugly and pathetic behavior you could exhibit.
Joel Kinnaman
#23. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and
Will Durant
#24. I know this kind of girl," Grace was saying. "It's the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven.
Gary Shteyngart
#25. The piano is just a different animal. It's expensive, it's big, it's heavy, and it doesn't fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible - it wasn't an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.
Ben Folds
#26. The upper middle-class cracker neighborhood ignored me, focused instead on its own pockets of human chaos. Four
Bobby Adair
#27. I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.
Billie Joe Armstrong
#28. I had a happy, dramafree youth, growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. The only thing that was slightly unusual compared to most of my friends was that I was an only child ... I don't think that's why my parents gave me a dummy, at least they've never copped to it.
Jeff Dunham
#29. We have a new joke on the reservation: 'What is cultural deprivation?' Answer: 'Being an upper-middle class white kid living in a split-level suburban home with a color TV.'
John Fire Lame Deer
#30. When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there's what's called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight.
Richard Benjamin
#31. Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.
Henry George
#32. There is no denying that there are 'royal roads' through existence for the upper classes; for them, at least, the highways are macadamized, swept, and watered.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#33. The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm
Kurt Vonnegut
#34. I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.
Jack D. Forbes
#35. Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story, - the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#36. For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.
Patrick J. Kennedy
#37. Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.
William Deresiewicz
#38. They don't hang dukes, darling. He'd be let off by reason of insanity. Everyone knows the upper classes are batty.
Rhys Bowen
#39. Morality is only for the middle class, sweet. The lower class can't afford it, and the upper classes have entirely too much leisure time to fill
Lisa Kleypas
#40. THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC.
John Connolly
#41. I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.
Erin McKeown
#42. The upper-caste, upper-class Hindus have to let go of their bigotry and prejudice. The oppressed have to let go of their justified but expensive urge for revenge and retribution. All over the world, the oppressed have only risen through self-empowerment - look at the Jews and the Parsis.
Chetan Bhagat
#43. I had a happy childhood in a nice suburban area, pretty idyllic, upper middle class and very, very white. My dad is an attorney. My mother is a housewife. They had five kids in seven years: me, my brother, and three sisters. I'm the oldest. We were all very active. My mother was exhausted.
Anthony Jeselnik
#44. member of the upper crust. He's a working class bloke, born with a tin spoon in his mouth. In our
Magda Alexander
#45. There is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS.
Timothy Noah
#46. I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.
Erland Josephson
#47. A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn't know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you?
Charles Murray
#48. One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
Orhan Pamuk
#49. I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.
Christopher Eccleston
#50. People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.
George Sanders
#51. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
Matthew Arnold
#52. As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.
Robert Reich
#53. Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
Camille Paglia
#54. Grant pressed his back against the outside wall of the turquoise and white two-story home he and a team of Miami PD officers were about to storm. On the surface the place fit in perfectly into the upper middle class neighborhood. On the inside, however, it was a fully functioning cocaine lab.
Katie Reus
#55. Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ayn Rand
#56. It is true that rich people can spend more money than middle class people, but there's this upper limit on what we can spend. I drive a very nice car, but it's only one car. I don't own a thousand, even though I earn a thousand times the median wage. I have a few jackets, not a few thousand.
Nick Hanauer
#57. I was born in Paris in 1950. I had a strict upper-class Catholic education but I never really fitted in the system and revolted against it quite early.
Francois Gautier
#58. I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject.
Eula Biss
#59. A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.
Robert B. Reich
#60. All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.
Christina Stead
#61. I tell you," said Augustine, "if there is anything that revealed with the strength of a divine law in our times, it is that the masses are to rise, and the under class becomes the upper one.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#62. Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately. If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods.
Carol Browner
#63. Politicians and bureaucrats are the new upper class in Norway. It is an upper class that is growing by an increasing number of top-paid politicians in municipalities and counties. They let the people suffer, but let themselves go free.
Carl I. Hagen
#64. You want to be upper class, you want to be first class, but when the plane crash, everybody dead,
Kanye West
#65. I think I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with.
Anne Hathaway
#66. I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.
Spalding Gray
#67. What was the fun of being upper-class if you had to work so hard to appear bored all the time?
Troy Soos
#68. Then God's a bigger poofter than Sweet Willie. "You might be right" said Justine. "He certainly isn't too fond of women, anyway. Second-class, that's us, way back in the Upper Circle. Front Stalls and the Mezzanine, strictly male.
Colleen McCullough
#69. The European upper-class could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, everyone a King David and Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed, hobbits with almost supernatural powers.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#70. I've got a fierce passion for politics but I can't stand the smarmy, hypocritical upper-middle-class dictator nation that prevails and has always prevailed in this country. I'm up for petrol bombers, mate, and fighting in the streets.
Pete Doherty
#71. The scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools, where they were raised in regimented same-sex settings.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#72. If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.
Warren Buffett
#73. Like traditional upper class families, there are nannies and servants, and the children, you know, come in to say good-night before they go to bed. There's very little private time with the children in the early years. Actually, there's much more private time with the children in the 20s.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#74. As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.
Louis Auchincloss
#75. I'm interested in illuminating the enormous disparity between vast poverty and the tiny upper class ... This vast inequity is unfair by definition, and I am interested in illuminating that and, where possible, changing that.
Nick McDonell
#76. You must remember, Madame Harris, elegance is in the details.
Lynn Sheene
#77. How shall we ever know if it's morning if there's no servant to pull up the blinds?
James M. Barrie
#78. I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Blake Bailey
#79. For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.'
Alex Ebert
#80. I guess I'm also obligated to note that the experience of sex workers who are not upper/middle class/white probably have much worse conditions than anything that's portrayed commonly in media/what I experienced.
Marie Calloway
#81. Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club.
'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at least hang about with our own friends.
Evelyn Waugh
#82. These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
Howard Zinn
#83. With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
Adrian McKinty
#84. Having photographs around the house is fine - if they're royal and on the grand piano.
Nicholas Haslam
#86. Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it's an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem.
Sarah Lacy
#87. I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?
Simon Raven
#88. ...and opened his mouth to speak in that precise drawl which is the trademark of the overly educated upper class english gentleman. A high voice: A biting one: definitely an eccentric.
Laurie R. King
#89. Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.
Michael Parenti
#90. I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point.
Anne Hathaway
#91. One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.
Matthew Arnold
#92. The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.
Oscar Wilde
#93. My Dad taught me that the English upper class are sent to school to be taught to be confident, whereas in Glasgow you're born confident. I've always thought that pretty much summed me up. Born confident.
Rankin
#94. Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.
Edith Wharton
#95. People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.
Lynne Tillman
#96. It's a ridiculous profession and it's getting worse. It's becoming almost like palm reading or phrenology. It's been relegated to pop best sellers and talk shows. The only people that take it seriously are upper middle class people who are lonely and can afford to pay someone to listen to them.
Ian Shoales
#97. Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad.
David Denby
#98. There's definitely privilege in the upper classes, but as a whole, music can be enjoyed by anybody who can gather around a radio.
Geoff Rickly
#99. If all the lifeboats were on the upper deck, then mostly first-class passengers survived?
Kate Alcott
#100. I was the runt of my class. So I got away with the whole 'Oh, he's so cute' thing. I was in upper division math courses, so I would have junior and senior girls in my class, and they'd just sit behind me and play with my hair. I didn't mind that so much.
Justin Lee
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