Ezra Koenig Quotes

Human society has dense borders - economic, religious and cultural - inculcated from an early age. We hate change.

In real life, I'm not super-posh but if that's the stereotype, I really don't care. It could be worse.

I am fairly classless because it is very difficult to class someone who comes from a mixed marriage.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

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.

People assume that I'm an aristocrat, but I don't really feel part of any class.

As a college-educated twentysomething woman with cool glasses and an affinity for modern art and Ryan Adams, I had the constant experience of strangers assuming I was a liberal. I grew accustomed to the shock and horror that passed over their faces when I revealed that, yes, I am a Republican.

I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

Ditzy dumb blonde? I can be ditzy. I can be.

People who don't know me look at my world as something very hard-core, and I don't feel it that way. It's not what attracts me.

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.

When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.

In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.

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.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

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.

Manbags are only acceptable if you are Italian, French, or gay.

Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

I think people are a little surprised sometimes at the level on which I actually talk. I don't talk like Caine. And every once in a while, somebody is surprised because I smoke and I drink. But I don't feel that is a contradiction.

I always felt like I was kind of an outsider because I didn't have the right things. I didn't have a Cadillac. I didn't have, you know, plastic on my furniture. That was the right way to be if you were Italian.