Thomas Frank Quotes

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

Class still matters in Britain today.

It's true; I'm fascinated by elite groups.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.

Language does not make one an elite.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

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

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

The great families have their privileges.

Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative 'classlessness' of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.