Martin Sheen Quotes

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

Stay out of the loop, the club, the inner circle.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Senators will associate only with men of their own class; and thus become strangers to the condition of the common people.

Golf is elitist, it's stuffy, it's exclusive and I hate that because I am not that and I was never welcomed in and I'm still not welcomed in.

Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.

The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.

The more rarefied a life you live, the easier it is to think that those who don't share it could be demonised. To find the common humanity becomes more of a struggle the more you surround yourself with nice things.

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

It's not an underclass anymore; it's an outer class.

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

Nobody likes being around poor people, especially poor people.

My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can't get into them. That's the point.

I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Amateurism is the strongest form of discrimination in sports. Because it discriminates against the underprivileged, it discriminates against the poor. If we want sports to go back to the wealthy, let's make it amateur again.

And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?

It's horrible how money and fame can make you acceptable while, if you're not famous or rich, you're not acceptable.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.