Judith Martin Quotes

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

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

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.

He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

...if you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down on you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

There is no distinction of persons among them, and deference is shown to merit rather than to noble blood.

If Eleanor Roosevelt has her way, how are we going to tell the rich from the poor?

… in a republic where all are free and equal--prosperity and position constitute rank.

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

You know our nation. If a citizen officer of one town has just one more silver button on his epaulette than another, great hue and cry arises and the important cause goes by the board …

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.

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 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 high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

I tried to play the etiquette game - the respect game - for too long, and it didn't work out for me.

There is no good in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else. The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

And when a whirl-winde hath blowne the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the yeomanly, this the Plebian bran.

If we were second class citizens we'd be driving old Cadillacs and living good. If we were first class we'd be driving a Rolls Royce.

In the field of snobbery, Australia is an underdeveloped country; even a few British ex-colonies, regarded as under developed in all other respects, could export a great deal of snobbery to Australia and still have enough to spare for their own, internal needs.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.