Class Stereotypes Quotes

The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

That's how the Germans are.... The aristocrats at the top hard as glass, cold as ice, servants of the King, the working masses willing, pliable, sentimental, susceptible to brutality, the middle class educated and cowardly to the point of servility.

When I was younger, I played a lot of upper-class English girls. Then I came to America, and everyone was like, 'She's very believable as trailer trash.'

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

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

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.

Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else - and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

We're not the millionaires that people think when they see busses.

Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

I had great memories of growing up in a working class estate. I remember it being sunny all the time. So we're putting that on screen. It's not people wallowing in degradation.

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.

What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive - and has never put in an honest day's work in its life.

I remember going to one party of this preppy, bourgeois crowd, and there was some obnoxious character there, really bad news, and saying, 'Oh my God, so the caricature you always see in films actually exists.'

People in L.A. think I'm so posh. They think I live in 'Downton Abbey.'

Sherlock' changed the perception of me. I have these cheekbones and this face that suggest very middle-class or period-drama roles. I want to show everyone there's much more to me than Irene Adler.