Brian Eno Quotes

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!'

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

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

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

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.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

I was a houseman, the lowest. I was just above - in the hierarchy of jobs, I was just above the Puerto Rican dishwashers - just above, so I felt superior to them.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

It's the Met Gala - everyone is huge. It feels very hierarchical, and I get really nervous in hierarchical spaces because I feel like everyone deserves to feel just as special as everyone else, but that's just not the way it is in this business.

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

I've always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

At dinner parties I sit below the salt now. There are a lot of interesting people there.

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

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

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 was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

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

Class is real. It can't be faked.

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 reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

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