Harry Mathews Quotes

You know, you can talk about race, you can talk about sex, you can talk about your biopsy. But when you get into class, people kind of clench up.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

Everybody feels like an outcast because the world is so large and every fingerprint is so vastly different from one another, and yet we have these standards and beliefs, and dogmatic systems of judgment and ranking, in almost all the societies of the world.

Class still matters in Britain today.

And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

But even with no money you could still go to places like the Scotch Club and, you know, John Lennon might be sitting right over there, but I was certainly not a part of any of that circle. I was truly peripheral.

I can dine at the White House, but I can still hang at the 'hood.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

I try to not be or associate with elitists.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

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.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

Our democracy may have an aristocracy of talent, as Jefferson said – which is fine – but we don’t want everyone else to be left out. Something like that seems to be happening, though.