Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Morality for the upper classes, the gallows for the rabbles.
'Downton Abbey' about upper-class posh people: of course it is.
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.
The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.
How shall we ever know if it's morning if there's no servant to pull up the blinds?
Having photographs around the house is fine - if they're royal and on the grand piano.
I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.
Tennis was a white, upper-class sport, and I wanted it to be treated like other sports were.
I grew up in South Florida, and my family was pretty poor. We weren't your upper-class whites by any means.
So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.
I grew up in a wealthy upper-class household in Jamaica, which was run along militaristic lines by my mother, Gloria.
Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.
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.
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.
When I was younger, I played a lot of upper-class English girls. Then I came to America, and everyone was like, 'She's very believable as trailer trash.'
If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.
What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it.
Given this voice, I know it does sound like I've come from money. But my dad was Canadian and my mum Hungarian, so it's not like I have some high-society, upper-class English background.
I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.
When I was in college, I lived in a mostly black, poor neighborhood. That's where I grew up, but I attended a mostly white upper-class school in conservative Mississippi. I was often very aware of how I presented myself.
I grew up in Solihull, on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn't feel allegiance to anything. I didn't have working-class pride or upper-class superiority.
I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We're African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.
That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.
For a very long time, loyalists were often left out of patriotic American histories of the revolution. Or they were caricatured as upper-class Tory reactionaries, or - rather like the Jacobites - made the subject only of nostalgic antiquarianism.
I believe that narcissistic personality disorder is a middle- and upper-class disease because you have to have the means to indulge it; you need money and power. Narcissists create havoc around them. You can't get away with that doing a menial job.
Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.
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.
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.
We live in a world where if you're white, an upper-class male of extreme privilege, and able-bodied, and you're nothing that takes you away from that norm, then you're going to have - then the world will not assign you problems because of what you are. That is actually the world we live in.
I've no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes' work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my - hang on.
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.
I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.
We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.
I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.
It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.
If you like looking at 'Starry Night' or water lilies or whatever, then why does it matter if it's an original? If the artist is still alive, and you want to support them, I get it. But if you want some famous dead guy's work, that's just a way for rich people to show off. It's the upper-class version of driving a giant Hummer.
The aristocrat, when he wants to, has very good manners. The Scottish upper classes, in particular, have that shell-shocked look that probably comes from banging their heads on low beams leaping to their feet whenever a woman comes into the room. Aristocrats are also deeply male chauvinist, and ... on the whole they tend to be reactionary.
In every conversation I've had - with housewives in Mumbai, with middle-class people, upper-class, in the slums - everyone says there is an underlying consciousness of karma. That people believe in karma - that what you're putting out is going to come back. If I do something to you, the energy of it is going to come back to me in the future.