Abraham Lincoln Quotes

I'm a product of public housing. My parents grew up poor, but their dream was to own a home.

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

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.

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.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

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

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.

You can't kid the public. When they see me they see I'm just a kid off a council estate - no more, no less.

I think there's a certain sense of grounding that comes from not being a rich kid from a media-elite school.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Outside of the family, education is the greatest determinant of social mobility.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

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.

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

There's only one thing money won't buy, and that is poverty.

Traditionally the great men of our country have sprung from poor environments; that being so, it would appear we have long suffered from a severe lack of poverty.

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.

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

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.