Nigel Cole Quotes

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.

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.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

The tradesmen are the only gentry in England.

I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country

It is surprising how few references in our politics there are to the underclass as compared by the middle class.

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'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

The whole idea of 'Death Line' was to kind of highlight class distinctions in England more than to make a scary movie, and I just kind of wrapped my political treatise of the class distinctions in England in this movie.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.