Harper Lee Quotes

We didn't do cotillions or anything. My family made fun of the pageants.

Golf has been the sport of the social elite, with lawyers and doctors. But I have never been embarrassed by the looks I've been given by others. I have sometimes been looked at with condescension and it still happens now, but I know how to deal with it - I know whose opinions count.

Nobody wants to be called common people, especially common people.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

The common people do not judge of vice or virtue by morality or immorality, so much as by the stamp that is set upon it by men of figure.

The British have turned their sense of humour into a national virtue. It is odd, because through much of history, humour has been considered cheap, and laughter something for the lower orders. But British aristocrats didn't care a damn about what people thought of them, so they made humour acceptable.

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

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

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

When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

The parson knows enough who knows a Duke.

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!'

I've got to be high class... Which is sad, because I like bars.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

Money doesn't buy class.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

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.

... more snobbish than their English butlers.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.

I know places you better speak low if you've been to college. Men will come across the room and cold-deck you if you hold your glass wrong.

In the West, it's just a given that art exists in this high-class place. But in Japan, there's no high class. The minute you come out, you're low class.