Fran Lebowitz Quotes

My wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around, and I was like, 'Who are these people?' It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

I'm interested in the lives of Americans for whom the ways this culture has tried to define itself - that is, self-esteem defined by material wealth - they have nothing to do with that.

I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.

I'm a proud product of the American middle class.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Poor people have big TV's. Rich people have big libraries.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

I'm from a middle class family but my father squandered all the money, so I didn't really run around with rich people. I was very judgmental towards a lot of them.

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

Change marriage and you change the world. Convince people that government, not God, lays down the rules for marriage, and they will believe more strongly that they determine right and wrong, that not even the world's rulers are subject to a higher authority.

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.

Social class means a hell of a lot and upper class people - no matter how well [Franklin ] Roosevelt did - it was stylish to hate him.

Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person's social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

I love my cross-sectioned, cross-cultural audience. Some of them are doing better than the average guy, but my audience has always been people who are struggling to stay in the middle class.

The majority decision constitutionalizes a distinction between a red leather pouch and a paper bag that is necessarily based at least in some part on economic and class differences and perceptions.

There was a time when it was considered vulgar and unnecessary to pursue money, but today anyone who doesn't believe in money must be out of their minds!

The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly extravagances of the poor.

A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.