Peter O'Toole Quotes

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Class is real. It can't be faked.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

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 poor generally follow behavior patterns established by the rich.

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.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

Class still matters in Britain today.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

I don't think you can get any more working class than me. Everyone seems posh to me.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well.

I still consider myself working class. I know my circumstances have changed dramatically since I was growing up back in Birkenhead.

I am not posh. I went to a comprehensive school.