Mary McCarthy Quotes

Inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.

Maybe I'm an elitist, but I don't feel like I am.

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.

I don't like Communism because it hands out wealth through rationing books.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

I can understand Communism, but not Socialism.

Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.

Only the elites despise earning money.

Our battle is against the bourgeoisie as the enemy of German Socialism and the saboteur of national freedom.

Pat Buchanan ... could give Karl Marx lessons in class warfare.

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.

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

Individualism and Socialism

... more snobbish than their English butlers.

There were the well-to-do intellectuals, pushed toward Fascism by their hostility to the working masses and by their disdain of the uncouth ways of the Socialists who, without adequate preparation, had taken possession of many municipalities and had been administering them in a manner even more ridiculous than dishonest.

Yeah, it is particularly upsetting to be called, whatever it was, sneery, or a snob, given the background I have.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.