Harriet Martineau Quotes

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

No white man, in a slaveholding community, was the menial servant of anyone.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

Class is more important than a game.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

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

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

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

Some readers tell me, 'We always treated our maid like she was a member of the family.' You know, that's interesting, but I wonder what your maid's perspective was on that.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

There are servers, and there are people that are served. There's something contradictory about that in a democracy, certainly.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn't the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life's lived before it gets to the parlor door.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.