Leonard Woolf Quotes

Character and class are character and class. Either you have it or you don't.

In life there exist two classes: first class and no class.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.

I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.

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

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

Class is real. It can't be faked.

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

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.

Everyone has class, one class or another.

Money doesn't buy class.

I'm reluctant to use the word class so much.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

As the classes in modern life come together, we have become much more intensely class conscious. It's a very curious thing. But I deal with human beings with whom I've come in contact and have had a chance to closely observe. Their upper-classness is not a matter of particular fascination for me.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?

I didn't say one negative word about poor people or about middle-class people or anything else. All I said was that the rich deserve our gratitude.

When aristocrats pretend they're common people -- they get common!

It is terribly important to do certain things, such as wear overembroidered dresses. After all, the mass follows class. Class never follows mass.

He isn’t like us Low. You know that right.” I knew what Cage was saying. Marcus was out of my league. He didn’t want me thinking there could ever be anything between me and his roommate. I was low class. Marcus was a rich kid. “I’m not stupid Cage.

When Ling was communicating to any person the signs by which messengers might find him, he was compelled to add, "the neighbourhood in which this contemptible person resides is that officially known as 'the mean quarter favoured by the lower class of those who murder by treachery'," and for this reason he was not always treated with the regard to which his attainments entitled him, or which he would have unquestionably received had he been able to describe himself as of "the partly-drained and uninfected area reserved to Mandarins and their friends.

Without class differences, England would cease to be the living theatre it is.

Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.