Quotes about Class

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

Upper classes are a nation's past, the middle class its future.

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated.

Morals are a luxury of the rich.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days.

I tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you [Colonel Pickering], because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class." "There is correct English: that is not slang." "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's plan in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe.