Paul Fussell Quotes

I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

You're looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

Chinese people as consumers, while they've always valued food and beverage for the health food qualities, they are also now wanting it in terms of other values: 'Does this speak about my position in society? Am I now middle-class, and does this matter to me?'

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

The one class you do not belong to and are not proud of at all is the lower-middle class. No one ever describes himself as belonging to the lower-middle class.

The charm of Britain has always been the ease with which one can move into the middle class.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

The desperately poor may accept handouts, because they feel they have to. For those who consider themselves at least middle class, however, anything that smacks of a handout is not desired. Instead, they want their economic power back.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.

I'm a nice middle-class girl.

I think you will find me to be a typical middle-class American.

Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.

Working class people vote Tory because they think it makes them look a bit posh.

I grew up in the middle class.

I can do posh.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

I didn't like the King's Cross world: it was grimy and dirty. I always envisioned myself in much more romantic and grand surroundings. I never really thought that I belonged to the working-class area at all.

I'm a working class lad.