Social Status Quotes

While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community, the tendency of people’s suffrage will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in a few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in greater degree considered only as a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy,or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.

The superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual.

If you have no enemies you are apt to be in the same predicament in regard to friends.

Families are always rising and falling in America.

May you be as rich as a Republican and have the sex life of a Democrat.

Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

In today's world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they're cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect.

Never make friends with people who are above or below you in status. Such friendships will never give you any happiness.

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman's education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might: Guid faith, he maunna fa' that.

There is a lot of speculation about what women are attracted to, and there are a lot of misconceptions.

Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

No man is a hero to his valet.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or aset of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen--makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest state of degradation.

It's cool now to play golf.

Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador.

I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.

There are two things that are fundamental—money and power, and I don’t care much about money