Margo Jefferson Quotes

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

I was very much a product of the public-school system. There was only one other kid in my class who had parents not involved in the stock market or law.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

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

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

I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.

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.

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

My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

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

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

My family, we're all WASPs.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.

I have a complex heritage: my mom is African American, and my dad is Jewish. Both were activists, and they met during the movement in the '70s.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.

Given this voice, I know it does sound like I've come from money. But my dad was Canadian and my mum Hungarian, so it's not like I have some high-society, upper-class English background.

My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.

My dad was this pint-sized Nigerian with an oversized personality. My mother is a tall six foot something Irish-English woman. Us walking down the street was quite an unusual sight, when I was growing up.