Ron Chernow Quotes

My mother was a waitress in a Lyons Corner House, but she married up. She was keen on bettering herself. She taught me how to use the right knives and forks and behave properly.

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

The accumulation of cultural capital - the acquisition of knowledge - is the key to social mobility.

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

[William Jennings Bryan was] a poor clod, a peasant come home to the barnyard, motivated solely by the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes.

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.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

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

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

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

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

At first, I didn't hang out with celebrity kids. That wasn't the way I was brought up. I went to a run-of-the-mill Catholic primary school when we first moved to L.A. But then I went to a high school where there were lots of 'industry' children. Those weren't my best friends and I've never set out to make myself a part of that scene.

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

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

And understand: class differences will not save you.

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.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

In my position, I could be a debutante. But we only got to this position by being a politically active family.

I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.