Kristin Scott Thomas Quotes

Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings.

I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong.

I was always told at school I was posh, then I came to London, and here I'm told I have a country accent.

I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a Ph.D. or be a lawyer, but as soon as you say something, you may be diminished in the eyes of someone else.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

Cricket was deemed too posh where I came from, and I'd never have risked walking home through the estates in my whites. My club played some of the posh schools. I'd have the cheapest kit, but I loved those games. As soon as the posh lads opened their mouths and you heard their accents, the stakes were raised.

I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.

I met someone with a title on my first day, Baronet von Something, and I thought: 'Look at me, I've really grafted. Who are these people who have just waltzed into Oxford? I don't want to hang out with those people. They're nothing like me.'

I didn't know we'd been tagged as posh. I went to a state school in London, so maybe people think I have a posh voice and that's where it comes from?

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.

I think pompous accents are inherently funnier.

Golf has been the sport of the social elite, with lawyers and doctors. But I have never been embarrassed by the looks I've been given by others. I have sometimes been looked at with condescension and it still happens now, but I know how to deal with it - I know whose opinions count.

People in Hollywood can condescend to the way a lot of other people are living.

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

The House of Commons is full of fat and pompous plutocrats…Public schools are cradles of sickening snobbery.

...a blue blood, a snob

I know we have an illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy which assumes to know a great deal, but which, when the flowing veil of pretension is torn off, is seen to posses neither talent nor information on which one can rear a useful superstructure.

I'm not interested in classes ... Far be it from me to foster inferiority complexes among the workers by trying to make them think they belong to some special class.

... more snobbish than their English butlers.

Dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

No social class, intellectual category or art form is immune to the snob virus.

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

The Delhi elite doesn't like me because I'm smarter than them.

We never see the fancy schools with the blazers and ties in films about Africa! But, in fact, we too have class and elitism.