H. W. Brands Quotes

My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

Ireland is a place where conditions are never normal—where class is distorted by race and an alien aristocracy.

I had been in a film, playing a young British aristocrat. My wife told me that she was invited to a dinner and she invited me to dinner and the hostess had seen me and said, 'You cannot bring him.' but I think that I've done enough to shatter the image.

The rich and the well-born, according to the Federalist Papers, was greatly feared by the founders.

I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.

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

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

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.

Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya.

Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.

I'm resigned to the fact that the corseted history of America is not as exciting as that of Britain.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

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

No matter how irrelevant social class now is, even the most eager egalitarian must be quietly proud that the posh English rose is still an industry standard for peerlessly sophisticated beauty.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.

Class is more important than a game.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

I intended to be one of the governing class.

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.

We need leisure ... because with us every man is of the ruling class.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.

I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe