Daniel Defoe Quotes

The tradesmen are the only gentry in England.

Money sometimes makes fools of important persons, but it may also make important persons of fools.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

In England, the class system is about a thousand years old, and it's not going to change any time soon.

The meanest and most hateful thing about money is that it even gives one talent.

The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

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

The bourgeois are other people.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

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.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

There was a time when formal clothes were one of life's great pleasures, as well as a way of describing instantly a man's status wealth. Toffs wore the most, the proles the least. Fast forward to 2008 and clothes are still an unrivalled pleasure but some men - and this includes many of our betters - have confused status with fake informality.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

You may be the most liberal, Liberal Englishman, and yet you cannot fail to see the categorical difference between the responsible and the irresponsible classes.

In this country there is no rank but rank mutton.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation.

The rich follow Wealth, and the Poor the Rich.

Distinction in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life

Aristocracy is like cheese. The older it is the higher it becomes.