Djuna Barnes Quotes

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

I never came into life with any favours or privileges.

Those who have the most wealth and the most property, their children have the first, the best, and the most.

Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.

If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like.

A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

I went from living in the Dominican Republic - every day, my mom and I would cook, or we'd go hang out with the kids - to flying a private jet to Chicago with Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid. People had champagne, and they were going to these amazing restaurants. It was a culture shock. It's important, I think, to have that. To see both sides.

On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.

I think that the elites have lived too long among themselves.

The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap.

I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds.

'Game of Thrones' has never much concerned itself with shining a torch on the powerless. Their hunger and suffering in a land ravaged by war is of little concern to the story's most powerful characters, whose antics bring so much pain to the people.

Everybody is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. There are only a very small percentage of those types of people, you know what I mean?

What is interesting to me about watching a show about the 1% is the world in which the 1% exists, meaning the flaws within the 99% that allow the 1% to exist.

I think earlier I struggled in a rickshaw and now I am struggling in a Bentley.

Because of how I grew up and on 'Made In Chelsea,' I never had any challenge.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

The sole purpose of a crown is to make anyone not wearing one feel like an insignificant pauper. They're obscene to the point of satire.

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.