Angus Wilson Quotes

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

You are not a special snowflake.

This whole segregation between famous people and other people is complete rubbish.

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy's vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

I don't want to be special.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

Everybody feels like an outcast because the world is so large and every fingerprint is so vastly different from one another, and yet we have these standards and beliefs, and dogmatic systems of judgment and ranking, in almost all the societies of the world.

Luxury may possibly contribute to give bread to the poor; but if there were no luxury, there would be no poor.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

Class still matters in Britain today.

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

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

I kind of look like every other girl, walking around.

Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

The reality in the neighborhood that I live in is: if I don't constantly reconcile what I have against what other people don't, either I need to leave and be around other people who have what I have, or I'm constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.