Zoe Tapper Quotes

'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.

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

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

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.

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.

I'm not the least bit polished, I come from a blue collar background and I never thought I could feel comfortable around the English.

In the U.K., there is a sort of obsession with class.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

With 'Titanic,' you have all the first-class passengers interwoven with wonderful stories about the maids and the engineers, the people downstairs in the galleys.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

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.

The tradesmen are the only gentry in England.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

Labor, in fact, to Spanish pride, was the badge of inferiority, to be escaped in every possible way. It is the general complaint of the publicists of the seventeenth century that every one sought to gain a livelihood in the public service or in the Church, and no one to earn it by honest work.

The workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved Utopia but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger.

We have a perception problem with the party. We are perceived as being a coastal elite, Ivy League party that does not connect to working-class people. The waitress, the teacher, the construction worker - we've lost our connection to them.

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.