Julian Sands Quotes

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

There's no Peter York Foundation, and you're no one without one.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

I come from a real working class background, and I didn't know anyone sophisticated - except I saw Edie Sedgewick once at the Art Museum in Philly. She had these black leotards and little black pumps and this big ermine cape and all these white dogs and black sunglasses and black eyes. She was classy!

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

Slowly but surely the old establishment is being replaced by a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class—a middle class that will include millions of people who traditionally may see themselves as working class but whose ambitions are far broader than their parents and grandparents.

Labor, in fact, to Spanish pride, was the badge of inferiority, to be escaped in every possible way. It is the general complaint of the publicists of the seventeenth century that every one sought to gain a livelihood in the public service or in the Church, and no one to earn it by honest work.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

We have a perception problem with the party. We are perceived as being a coastal elite, Ivy League party that does not connect to working-class people. The waitress, the teacher, the construction worker - we've lost our connection to them.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

Remember 'The Brady Bunch' TV show? That 1970s family had a full-time live-in housekeeper called Alice. Mrs. Brady worked at the PTA and did community work. She didn't clean her own house. That was middle class. Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper. Everything it meant to be middle class has changed dramatically.

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

Every country has rich people. But only a few places have achieved a vibrant and stable middle class. And in the history of the world, none has been more vibrant and more stable than the American middle class.