John Gay Quotes

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

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

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Pride perceiving humility honorable, often borrows her cloak.

One of the jobs of a stand-up comedienne is to expose hypocrisy.

No writer before the middle of the 19th century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesque or as pastoral decoration. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

We (we!) drop leaflets on the Argentine troops besieged in Port Stanley [during the Falklands War], urging them to lay down their arms. Were such leaflets dropped on our troops we would consider them contemptible and ludicrous; our leaflets are represented as a great humanitarian gesture.

We in England, divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen, and artificers or labourers.

The stability of medieval society depended on the fixity of all of its parts, as that of modern society is on their mobility.

The Devil himself could not tell which government, England or France is more wicked.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.

Nobody's wrong but England – and England's always wrong, Too late – or else too early – too soft – or else too strong. And when for once the wide world begins to praise her name Her own sons crowd and hurry to shout her back to shame.

When I was in my twenties, I strongly identified with Jane Austen's 'Emma' - her human failings mixed with a desire to do good.

First, one scrambles for wealth. Then, one luxuriates in mocking the effeteness that comes with it.

Inverted snobbery is just as dangerous as snobbery itself, you know - that pride in having nothing.