Stephen Daldry Quotes

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

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

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

We know that the British public are obsessed with class.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

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

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

I don't like a class system. I don't like the idea of being in a different class than other people.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.