Richard Jefferies Quotes

I wasn't born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.

My own conviction is, confirmed by a very close study of parochial registers, that some of the very best blood in England is to be found among the tradesmen of our county towns.

Vulgar and common persons, as they carry nothing out of this world, so they leave nothing in it: they receive no eminency in their birth, they acquire none in their life, they have none when they die, they leave none at their death.

People talk about me as if I am the sole inheritor of the Guinness family fortune and worth masses, but I have hundreds of cousins.

I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some disadvantages in having really blue blood in one's veins, like grandmamma and me.

My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.

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

I think America has dealt with - I mean, this is simplistic, and of course I don't live in America - but the impression I get is that there is not a kind of obligation to dislike those who are better off or be frightened of those who are worse off.

I come from a family of servants. My father's father was a servant, and my father's father's father was a slave.

You can't tell a millionaire's son from a billionaire's.

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

As an overruling providence may succeed our wishes, let us rear an offspring in every respect worthy to fill the most illustrious stations of their predecessors.

Her name was called Lady Helena Herring and her age was 25 and she mated well with the earl.

Let us make future generations remember us as proud ancestors just as, today, we remember our forefathers.

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

Ignorant people are apt to overrate the value of what is called education. The sons of the poor, having suffered the privations of poverty, think of wealth as the mother of joy.

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

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

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.

Technically, I'm a knight. My family goes back a thousand years in the Naples area. We're a titled, noble people.

I'm the son of a former billionaire, but I'm just a working man.

And those are the Rich, who transmit what they have to their Posterity; whereby particular Families become rich; and of such are compounded Cities, Countries, Nations, etc.

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

THE rich possess ample means to realize any theory they may chuse to adopt in the education of their children, regardless of the cost; but it is not so with him whose Subsistence is derived from industry.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.