The Upper Classes Quotes

#1. the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned.

Thomas Piketty

#2. Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost. She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

Charles Dickens

#3. Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

Cesare Pavese

#4. Don't be a hero. Leave that to them that started the war - the upper classes, the Conservatives, the officers.

Ken Follett

#5. We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only the upper classes can afford.

Benito Mussolini

#6. How do you poop? Where does it go? If you get more prestigious as you go down, aren't you shitting on the upper classes?

Alanea Alder

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.

Oscar Wilde

#10. Morality for the upper classes, the gallows for the rabbles.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#11. I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

Caitlin Moran

#12. How stupid would that sound? It was high school, not the Hindu cast system, where the Untouchables have to avoid 'polluting' the upper classes.

Marni Bates

#13. (a statement someone makes to Maisie regarding attitudes prior to WWII):
"...the corridors of power are littered with Fascist leanings; anything to save the upper classes through disenfranchisement of the common man while allowing the common man to think you're on his side.

Jacqueline Winspear

#14. In the earlier centuries the upper and lower social classes engaged in homicide at comparable rates. But as the homicide rate fell, it dropped far more precipitously among the upper classes than among the lower ones, an important social change

Steven Pinker

#15. 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

#16. But in the early 1900s, the medical profession began to promote the health benefits of tanning. Workers were increasingly moving into factories where complexions grew pallid, as the upper classes spent more time outside playing sports.

Anonymous

#17. Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

Germaine Greer

#18. 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

#19. Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.

Steven Pinker

#20. It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that's consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#21. They don't hang dukes, darling. He'd be let off by reason of insanity. Everyone knows the upper classes are batty.

Rhys Bowen

#22. It is true, there was no public-school system, and the reason for it was very plain. The wealth of the upper classes enabled them to have private tutors.

John Sergeant Wise

#23. 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

#24. Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

Toni Morrison

#25. the collective fears of the Anglo-Saxon upper and middle classes about a changing America. Record levels of immigration were transforming the nation's ethnic and religious makeup. And

Adam Cohen

#26. Trend-setters are members of upper classes who adopt the styles of lower classes to differentiate themselves from middle classes, who wouldn't be caught dead in lower-class styles because they're the ones in danger of being mistaken for them.

Steven Pinker

#27. Poritrin nobles professed to follow gentle, bucolic Navachristianity, but their core beliefs did not extend to their daily lives. They had their festivals, and embraced religious trappings, but the Poritrin upper classes did little to demonstrate their true faith.

Brian Herbert

#28. Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.

Michael Parenti

#29. 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

#30. Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle.

Donald Barthelme

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. If the public can't see justice being done, or afford the costs of justice, then the entire system becomes little more than a cozy club solely for the benefit of judges, lawyers and their lackeys, a sort of care in the community for the upper middle classes.

Heather Brooke

#34. The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.

Charlotte Curtis

#35. Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Ayn Rand

#36. 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