John Mortimer Quotes

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

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

I have a feeling that life as a billionaire in Silicon Valley is very different than the life that you or I would lead. Unless you're a billionaire; I don't know your financial situation.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

The Tea Party people say they're angry about socialism, but maybe they're really angry about capitalism. If there's a sense of being looked down upon, it's that sense of failure that's built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers.

Ann Romney... looked to me like a corporate wife. The stories she told about struggles - eh! It's hard for me to believe. I mean, she's a very rich woman, and I know that, and America knows that.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high or lowly. / And ordered their estate.

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.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

In the United States you have socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

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.

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.

I think that the elites have lived too long among themselves.

Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.

The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.