Don Rickles Quotes

The comic I can now never enjoy again is Bill Cosby. He was truly one of the first comedians I got into.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

I don't think I met anyone posh until I went to London.

I don't feel that Jewish people have a class.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.

Lily Tomlin...I used to watch reruns of Laugh-In and she was always my favorite part. She's this very unique talent and the way she does things has been a very big influence on me.

And what an example of the power of dress young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar;—it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society. But now he was enveloped in the old calico robes, that had grown yellow in the same service; he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a parish child—the orphan of a workhouse—the humble, half-starved drudge—to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not.

A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?

For we have come by different ways to this place... I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak with waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.

The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease, and the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom.

I was scared to death because for the comics of my generation, HBO specials are like the pinnacle. I'm thinking of all these unbelievable comedians I've seen on HBO: Chris Rock, George Carlin, Damon Wayans, Richard Pryor and Billy Crystal. I started having a panic attack seeing my name in that list of people. It was pretty overwhelming.

The indiscriminate denunciation of the rich is mischievous.... No poor man was ever made richer or happier by it. It is quite as illogical to despise a man because he is rich as because he is poor. Not what a man has, but what he is, settles his class. We can not right matters by taking from one what he has honestly acquired to bestow upon another what he has not earned.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.