Eric Idle Quotes

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.

Wealthy people have not disappeared, they are just not so willing to show off their wealth.

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

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

Having wealth and prestige by being a court official comes at a cost. Being poor and having low social status give people freedom.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.

I'm not exceptional. I didn't grow up with privilege.

Working-class people don't tend to be wooed by celebrity.

I often think what it was like not to have much money. I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

I'm not the least bit polished, I come from a blue collar background and I never thought I could feel comfortable around the English.

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

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

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

I'm not interested in classes ... Far be it from me to foster inferiority complexes among the workers by trying to make them think they belong to some special class.

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

Because of the British Welfare State …, I was never hungry…. The schools I attended were free and actually acted as ladders of mobility for those randomly given the skills in the genetic lottery of life to climb them.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

I dunno whether it was to do with my parents - we were working-class - but it was important to me to be self-sufficient.