Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

It's not necessarily the most compelling thing for a liberal like myself to be making an impassioned plea for the divine rights of kings and for observing the hierarchy of order, of class and authority.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

It is terribly important to do certain things, such as wear overembroidered dresses. After all, the mass follows class. Class never follows mass.

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

The English, of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some concept of liberty, and set some value on it, but the very idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them.

In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of class.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

Everyone has to contribute, or they become laborers.

To this day, on my cheat days from my diet, which are New Year's Eve and my birthday, I buy luxury foods that are very indicative of my class.

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.

A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?

In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.

Marriages are so complicated that no one person is the culprit. But, I am really interested in class without really realizing that I am. It's more the manifestations of different classes that interest me.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!

Class is an intangible quality which commands, rather than demands, the respect of others.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.