Upper Class Quotes

“Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.”
― David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise

“Like a gloomy and sinister paradox since its apparition until now, socialism suffered terrible and terrifying metamorphoses. With the name of the most human doctrine—Socialism—the most ominous and naughty crimes against humanity were done. The National Socialism of Hitler created Auschwitz and Majdanek and the People’s socialism of Stalin — Gulag and Kolima! And both of them buried more than fifty million people! That’s monstrous!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“Just like the myth of the people’s or popular capitalism, which was propagated since the mid1950s in the countries to the west of Berlin Wall, to the east and the north of it, since the same time it was introduced the myth of the people’s or popular socialism. But the suggestion is always the same. Under any “people’s” power—from people’s capitalism to people’s socialism—the greatest illusion suggested to the oppressed classes is that the people are sovereign, i.e., that all the people dominate over themselves. In this respect, even John Kenneth Galbraith makes Marxist conclusions, which even in the Internet epoch have the same power: “Young people are suggested that in a democracy the entire power belongs to the people!” (“The Anatomy of Power”)
Yet, old people know that this is not true!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“The animal bounded down the dock in huge strides.”
― Paul A. Barra, Strangers and Sojourners: A Big Percy Pletcher thriller

“That sounds like Russian interference to me.” “Agreed.”
They sat sipping their drinks.
“Should we even be drinking vodka?”
― Paul A. Barra, Strangers and Sojourners: A Big Percy Pletcher thriller

“Rich people show their appreciation through favors. When everyone you know has more money than they know what to do with, money stops being a useful transactional tool. So instead you offer favors. Deals. Quid pro quos. Things that involve personal involvement rather than money. Because when you're that rich, your personal time is your limiting factor.”
― John Scalzi, Lock In

“Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays

“The big Hatteras roared south, ducking in to come up under Montauk. He slowed her after dark and cruised the Atlantic coast of Long Island westward into Brooklyn on autopilot.”
― Paul A. Barra, Strangers and Sojourners: A Big Percy Pletcher thriller

“...at last she drew on her gloves, straightened her hat, and went away with that odd self-possession which seems to characterize all the older women of the Crescent. Time takes its toll of them, death and tragedy come inevitably, but they face the world with quiet faces and unbroken dignity.”
― Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Album

“Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.”
― Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins At Home: Generosity And Self-interest Among The Philanthropic Elite

“This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“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

“She wants to live in the delirious professions, as Valéry calls them -- trades in which the main instrument is your opinion of yourself and the raw material is your reputation or standing.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“I hate this complete obsession with class, especially at this place, you can hardly say 'hello' to anyone before they are getting all prolier-than-thou and telling you about how their dad's a one eyed chimney-sweep with rickets, and how they've still got an outside loo, and have never been on a plane or whatever, all that dubious crap, most of which is usually lies anyway, and I'm thinking why are you telling me this? Am I meant to feel guilty? D'you think it's my fault or something, or are you just feeling pleased with yourself for escaping your pre-determined social role or some self congratulatory bullshit? I mean, what does it matter anyway? People are people, if you ask me, and they rise or fall by their own talents and merits, and their own labours, and blaming the fact they've got a settee rather than a sofa, or eat tea rather tan dinner, that's just an excuse, it's just whining self-pity and shoddy thinking.... I don;t make judgements about other people because of their background and I expect people to treat me with the same courtesy... It's my parent's moeny and its not as if they got it from nicking people's dole or running sweatshops in Johannesburg or something. They worked fucking hard for what they've got. It's a privilege and they treat it as such and they do their best to give something back. But if you ask me, theres no snob like an inverted snob... Im just so fucking bored of people trying to pass plain old envy off as some sort of virtue.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“Democracy is the process to elect government of the upper-class people, by the poor people and for the corporate people.”
― Nilesh (Neil) jain

“Imagine living in a world where we judge each others intellect based on social statuses and class. Raw intelligence is not reserved for "upper classes" or those with a particular accent.”
― Torron-Lee Dewar, Creativity is Everything

“He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm.”
― Eliza Parsons, Errors of Education

“Here’s the thing about middle-class
people. They pretend not to look, but they
do. They were too polite to actually stare.
Instead, they did this weird thing of
catching sight of Will in their field of
vision and then determinedly not looking
at him. Until he’d gone past, at which
point their gaze would flicker towards
him, even while they remained in
conversation with someone else. They
wouldn’t talk about him, though. Because
that would be rude.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“There are few greater pleasures in life than a devoted butler.”
― Deanna Raybourn, Silent in the Sanctuary

“How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy. Maybe it was to hearken back to their seventeenth-century New England bootstraps--the manual trades that had made them stalwart and humble and virtuous in the eyes of their Lord. Or maybe it was just a way of politely understating their predestination to having it all.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“A group’s preference for specific activities is one important way values emerge in a culture. The leisure habits of the rich are framed as activities to see and to be seen at. They prove exercise, but no exertion; they are a courtly site of sociality and pleasure.”
― Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design

“The ancient Egyptian book of the dead is a series of spells to guide you through your afterlife. If you were in the upper class, everything was arranged so that you'd be buried with the tools necessary to avoid being banished to "nonexistence," (what we call the eventual "fade to black.") But if your pass the "weighing of the heart" ritual and make it to the "two fields," you'll lead an idyllic, "heaven"-like afterlife. . . So, in the end, rich people become like their money. . . When you spend money, it doesn't die. . . it just travels.”
― Dash Shaw, Doctors

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“Life in squats with my mother hadn't really prepared me for what to expect from the aristocracy. On balance, I'd have to say people were a lot better behaved in the squats.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Ink Black Heart

“I'm driving home to change," Win said. "Then I'm dining at Merion." Mainliners never ate; they dined. "Care to join me?”
― Harlan Coben, Back Spin

“Right under their noses was Midas, clad in its gaudy neon robes day and night. The harlot teased at their hearts but would never invite them back inside the citadel.”
― Rieko Yoshihara, Ai no Kusabi Vol. 1: Stranger

“What the poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated, is not to be taught other people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves. It is not physical science that will do this, even if they could learn it much more thoroughly than they are able to do. After reading, writing, and arithmetic (the last a most important discipline in habits of accuracy and precision, in which they are extremely deficient), the desirable thing for them seems to be the most miscellaneous information, and the most varied exercise of their faculties. They cannot read too much. Quantity is of more importance than quality, especially all reading which relates to human life and the ways of mankind; geography, voyages and travels, manners and customs, and romances, which must tend to awaken their imagination and give them some of the meaning of self-devotion and heroism, in short, to unbrutalise them.”
― John Stuart Mill, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, Vol 1

“And then there's that double-barreled name a lot of them toffs have, like they have to drag their ancestors up from the grave so we all know who they're related to.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, The White Lady

“nor had he, then, lost his upper class arrogance, the innate conviction that it could not be serious - such things just don't happen, not to people one knows!”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth

“How do you recognise a Glaswegian in English literature? He's the cut-out figure who wields a razor-blade, gets moroculous drunk and never has a single, solitary 'thought' in his entire life. He beats his wife and beats his kids and beats his next door neighbour. And another striking thing; everybody from a Glaswegian or working-class background, everybody in fact from any regional part of Britain -none of them knew how to talk! Unlike the nice, stalwart upper-class English hero whose words on the page were always absolutely splendidly proper and pure and pristinely accurate whether in dialogue or without. Most interesting of all, for myself as a writer, the narrative belonged to them and them alone. They owned it. The place where thought and spiritual life exists.”
― James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural & Political