James Boswell Quotes

One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you're obliged to act like one.

Chivalry only worked with men of the same class.

I'm not an aristocrat. I have no idea what that is.

Character and class are character and class. Either you have it or you don't.

A Plowman on his knees is higher than a Gentleman on his legs.

We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.

The desperately poor may accept handouts, because they feel they have to. For those who consider themselves at least middle class, however, anything that smacks of a handout is not desired. Instead, they want their economic power back.

The Romanoffs are like the other side of 'The Great Gatsby.' 'Gatsby' is about the people who don't have the history but who want it. And 'The Romanoffs' is about the people who have it and don't know what to do with it.

I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.

I don't go hunting with kings and princes.

I think poshness is very funny! But I think it's also delightful. There's something wonderful and very innocent about it, particularly with the Edwardians.

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

Gentility is nothing but Ancient Riches.

I didn't like the King's Cross world: it was grimy and dirty. I always envisioned myself in much more romantic and grand surroundings. I never really thought that I belonged to the working-class area at all.

I'm a working class lad.

I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.

Great families of yesterday we show, And lords, whose parents were the Lord knows who.

Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children.

Harold Wilson is a petty bourgeois and will remain so in spirit even if they make him a Viscount.

When you are around people who have money, you realise money isn't that impressive, it's about your class, morals and how you conduct yourself.

In gay culture hookups are a way of escaping your class.

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school.

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.