Martin Cruz Smith Quotes

I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.

The tradesmen are the only gentry in England.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.

I can assure you that the class system is alive and well and living in people's minds in England.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

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

I didn't necessarily grow up in a trailer park, but there is a brief part of that in my life. So I can make fun of it a little bit. I'm not too much of an outsider, where I'm just making fun of someone.

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

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

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.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

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

Some have objected to the instruction of the lower classes from an apprehension that it would lift them above their sphere, make them dissatisfied with their station in life, and, by impairing the habits of subordination, endanger the tranquility of the state; an objection devoid surely of all force and validity.