Nathaniel Parker Willis 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.

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

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

The bourgeois are other people.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

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

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

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.

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.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.

At dinner parties I sit below the salt now. There are a lot of interesting people there.

The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.