Kate Reardon Quotes

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

In my position, I could be a debutante. But we only got to this position by being a politically active family.

It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

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

At first, I didn't hang out with celebrity kids. That wasn't the way I was brought up. I went to a run-of-the-mill Catholic primary school when we first moved to L.A. But then I went to a high school where there were lots of 'industry' children. Those weren't my best friends and I've never set out to make myself a part of that scene.

I had been in a film, playing a young British aristocrat. My wife told me that she was invited to a dinner and she invited me to dinner and the hostess had seen me and said, 'You cannot bring him.' but I think that I've done enough to shatter the image.

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

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

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

And understand: class differences will not save you.

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.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

Language does not make one an elite.

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, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

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.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.