Mark Twain Quotes

The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes.

NOBLEMAN, n. Nature's provision for wealthy American minds ambitious to incur social distinction and suffer high life.

Lyall had spent centuries nibbling about the great layered cake that was polite society while Lord Akeldama acted the part of the frosting on its top.

I always wanted so much glamour in my life, so I have always been obsessed with class, and from dating a few people who were from old money and a few from new money in my 20s, I just sort of became obsessed with this idea of clueless rich people.

Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you're Royalty.

My friend Anderson Cooper is the scion of one of America's great shipping and railroad families, the Vanderbilts.

It is not so much that I am a blue-blooded oligarch: I just don't feel like an oligarch.

I've always been fascinated with aristocracy. I'm really interested in the Ivy Leagues, the final clubs, all the really old-money families, the concept of old money.

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.

Our hotel was full of legislators and volunteer officers, mostly planters or sons of planters, and almost without exception men of standing and property. South Carolina is an oligarchy in spirit, and allows no plebeians in high places.

I don't think I met anyone posh until I went to London.

Gentility is nothing but Ancient Riches.

Aristocrats: n. fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts - guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.

We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?

In Europe there's the upper crust, and these are long, historically families and social systems that have certain established rules that's harder to break into.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.

My father was the president of the Hearst Corporation, and my parents were close friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and they all had pugs.

I really think I'd have enjoyed the life of a Regency buck.

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

People tend to assume that I come from a long line of castle-dwelling gentry and am made of money.

It's the weird thing Eton does - you're at school next to lords and earls and, in my case, Prince William, so you end up being used to dealing with those sorts of people.

George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s).

'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.