DeObia Oparei Quotes

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

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

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

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.

Language does not make one an elite.

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!'

I've never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

The jests of the rich are ever successful.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is all right.

We have been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.

The great families have their privileges.

The preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station…

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority.

The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.

My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.

Cricket was deemed too posh where I came from, and I'd never have risked walking home through the estates in my whites. My club played some of the posh schools. I'd have the cheapest kit, but I loved those games. As soon as the posh lads opened their mouths and you heard their accents, the stakes were raised.

I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.

There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren't.