Melvyn Bragg Quotes

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.

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

Class is real. It can't be faked.

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.

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.

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.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

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

Class still matters in Britain today.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

A person born in the middle class, as I was, educated in bourgeois institutions, … is poorly prepared to take a leading part in revolutionary activity.

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

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.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.