E. M. Forster Quotes

Never mind, dear, we're all made the same, though some more than others.

A rich man's joke is always funny.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

The wealthy don't have any sense of humor. It's not like the English, where the theater is perhaps the one place where they have a sense of humor about themselves.

When something really affects you, it's hard to find the humor in it sometimes. There's are a lot of reasons why there are so many white male comedians, but I think part of it is that they are able to joke about a lot of things because a lot of things don't affect them personally.

There is no good in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else. The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.

We're all animals, high school is animals, but some of us are more animal than others. Like in 'Animal Farm,' which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others? Here in the real world, all equals are created animal, but some are more animal than others.

For a beggar to live at court is not so much as the King to dwell with him in his cottage.

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.

Kings! Why, what's a king? .... Is their blood purer than our own? We are all the seed of Abraham!

When people are educated, class distinction disappears.

I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

To act like everyone has had the same access to share their funny is willful ignorance at its best - and just a good ol' fashioned front at its truth.

I treat everyone with the same respect they treat me with. Just because I earn more money doesn't make me more special than them or give me the right to talk to them in a certain manner.

A girl born in Drumchapel in Glasgow has just as much right to good health and the opportunities provided by a good education as a Surrey stockbroker's son.

In life there exist two classes: first class and no class.

After all, there is such a thing as looking like a gentleman. There are men whose class no dirt or rags can hide, any more than they could Ulysses. I have seen such men in plenty among workmen, too; but, on the whole, the gentleman--by whom I do not mean just now the rich--have the superiority in that point. But not, please God, forever. Give us the same air, water, exercise, education, good society, and you will see whether this "haggardness," this "coarseness" (etc., for the list is too long to specify), be an accident, or a property, of the man of the people.

He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.

All men are born equal, but some of them outgrow it.

The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.