Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.

I was born in Montreal and came from a lower-middle-class family.

It used to be you wanted to marry up.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

Though I speak as a soldier, I must deplore the dominating influence of the military

My parents spent a lot of money so I wouldn't sound like I came from Queens. I went to speech class.

My father was a rags-to-riches businessman who came over in the Sixties with no money. On my mother's side, I am the grandson of a High Court judge and celebrated intelligence officer, so it's quite an unusual combination.

I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.

Football is generally a working-class sport, and because of the fact I went to private school and was brought up slightly differently, people think that makes me a different person.

My father was a mailman. His father was a coal miner. My mother's mother could barely speak English. And their son today stands on this podium in the great state of Ohio not only as the governor, but a candidate for president of the United States.I do believe in miracles.I've had a lot of elections. But my elections are really not about campaigns. I tell my people that these are about a movement.A movement to do things like provide economic growth. And a movement not to let anybody be behind.

I was raised in a family where my father was the first one to go to college.

My mother is a first generation American. Her father worked in the Roebling Steel Mill in Trenton, New Jersey.And yet my mother became the first person in her family to get a college degree.

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

My dad was young. He went to work. But he'd been to war. He'd seen some of the world. It wasn't like he was going to be an extensive traveler or something. That didn't seem to be in the nature of - in his nature or in the nature of his parents or many of the folks in my family, really. They were - we had a cousin that went to - off to Brown University. It was like a nuclear explosion took place.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.

I might have been born just plain white trash / but Fancy was my name.

... it's hard to be politically conscious and upwardly mobile at the same time.

After a decade of war you have this Pentagon-military apparatus run amok using resources that they shouldn't be to try to manipulate U.S. public opinion.

I'm from a pretty working-class background, and I really worked hard in my life to eradicate those parts of myself that were stupidly trapped in that world.Those of us who come up that way made a series of choices to benefit ourselves and make ourselves more generous and open.