David Cannadine Quotes

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

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

Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

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

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

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

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

Class is real. It can't be faked.

If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

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

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.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

The tradesmen are the only gentry in England.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.

I don't think old posh is as intimidating as new posh, is it?

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.