Jeremy Irons Quotes

I went to quite a nice school as a kid, where everyone was quite posh, because my dad was making some money.

We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?

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.

The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.

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.

Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.

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

It's the weird thing Eton does - you're at school next to lords and earls and, in my case, Prince William, so you end up being used to dealing with those sorts of people.

It was a wealthy family, and they heard me talk about movies, and they told me I should go into movies. That's the benefit of hanging out with rich people; they have no sense of what is or isn't possible.

I come from a real working class background, and I didn't know anyone sophisticated - except I saw Edie Sedgewick once at the Art Museum in Philly. She had these black leotards and little black pumps and this big ermine cape and all these white dogs and black sunglasses and black eyes. She was classy!

I had gone to a Catholic prep school where everyone was rich and having kids by the time they were 30.

I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood, she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite.

The Trudie Styler that is spoken of is extremely privileged in life and feels that privilege.

I grew up in a middle-class family. I went to law school.

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people's minds in England.

Aristocrats: n. fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts - guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?' she asked him suddenly.'Reverence,' he replied.

Here in England the welfare of the State depends on the conduct of our aristocracy.

I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.