These upper class quotes will inspire you. Upper class is the economic group with the greatest wealth and power in society.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging upper class quotes, upper class sayings, and upper class proverbs.
Best Upper Class Quotes
- “The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.” ~ George Orwell
- “People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Upper classes are a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.” ~ Ayn Rand
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“Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it’s one of the most charming things about them.” ~ Germaine Greer
- “In England … education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.” ~ Joseph Epstein
- “In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.” ~ Whittaker Chambers
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“There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.” ~ Judith Martin
- “White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.” ~ Holly Near
- “I was born in Paris in 1950. I had a strict upper-class Catholic education but I never really fitted in the system and revolted against it quite early.” ~ Francois Gautier
- “Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.” ~ Jeff Koons
- “Generosity toward the lower classes historically has never been an important part of upper-class awareness.” ~ Michael Parenti
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“Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you’re Royalty.” ~ Benedict Cumberbatch
- “What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass” ~ August Strindberg
- “Institutions work this way. A son is murdered by the police, and nothing is done. The institutions send the victim’s family on a merry-go-round, going from one agency to another until they wear out and give up. this is a very effective way to beat down poor and oppressed people, who do not have the time to prosecute their cases. Time is money to poor people. To go to Sacramento means loss of a day’s pay – often a loss of job. If this is a democracy, obviously it is a bourgeois democracy limited to the middle and upper classes. Only they can afford to participate in it.” ~ Huey Newton
- “All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.” ~ Christina Stead
- “There’s definitely privilege in the upper classes, but as a whole, music can be enjoyed by anybody who can gather around a radio.” ~ Geoff Rickly
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“We are in the more blessed category, the upper class who lived by faith and believed even though we hadn’t seen!” ~ David Berg
- “The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “Morality for the upper classes, the gallows for the rabbles.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.” ~ Alfred Russel Wallace
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“I’m not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.” ~ Kristin Scott Thomas
- “Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.” ~ Cesare Pavese
- “It would be hard to find a single example in history in which a group that cast more than 50 percent of the vote got away with calling itself the victim… Women are the only ‘oppressed’ group to share the same parents as the ‘oppressor’; to be born into the middle class and upper class as frequently as the ‘oppressor’; to own more of the culture’s luxury items than the ‘oppressor’.” ~ Warren Farrell
- “When the Democrats are attacked for [inciting class warfare] they shrink back. They don’t say what obviously should be said, “Yes, there is class warfare. There has always been class warfare in this country.” The reason the Democrats shrink back is because the Democrats and the Republicans are on the same side of the class war. They have slightly different takes. The Democrats are part of the upper class that is more willing to make concessions to the lower class in order to maintain their power.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.” ~ Ed Miliband
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“We deny your internationalism because it is a luxury which only the upper classes can afford.” ~ Benito Mussolini
- “Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, “Oh, I’m living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I’m curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I’ll read a novel about it.” We don’t have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don’t have to do that anymore.” ~ Jonathan Franzen
- “People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don’t have the money. There are always differences among differences.” ~ Lynne Tillman
- “If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you’re talking to.” ~ Michael Caine
- “The French movies that are promoted abroad are the ones that give a trendy, cultural, petit bourgeois, upper class image of France, but it’s true that people who are poor in France are the same in New York or in India.” ~ Gaspar Noe
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“Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.” ~ Matthew Arnold
- “A lot of people think that in order to be an addict you must come from a broken home or from the other side of the tracks. Both of those excuses couldn’t be farther from the truth. I come from a family that has a lot of love for one another and I was raised in a middle to upper class neighborhood.” ~ Jason Peter
- “The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “…many of the officials, courtiers, and priests, representing the upper class of Egyptian society but not the royalty, looked strikingly like modern Europeans, especially long-headed ones” ~ Carleton S. Coon
- “The piano is just a different animal. It’s expensive, it’s big, it’s heavy, and it doesn’t fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible – it wasn’t an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.” ~ Ben Folds
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“A broad definition of crime in England is that it is any lower-class activity that is displeasing to the upper class.” ~ David Frost
- “My Dad taught me that the English upper class are sent to school to be taught to be confident, whereas in Glasgow you’re born confident. I’ve always thought that pretty much summed me up. Born confident.” ~ Rankin
- “My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That’s what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it’s very, very dull, whether that’s all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same.” ~ Jarvis Cocker
- “Politics in Bolivia must combine social consciousness with professional competency. In my administration, intellectuals from the upper class can be cabinet ministers or ambassadors, as can members of Indian ethnic groups.” ~ Evo Morales
- “I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.” ~ Billie Joe Armstrong
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“The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the Upper Classes, Have still the Upper Hand.” ~ Noel Coward
- “Like traditional upper class families, there are nannies and servants, and the children, you know, come in to say good-night before they go to bed. There’s very little private time with the children in the early years. Actually, there’s much more private time with the children in the 20s.” ~ Blanche Wiesen Cook
- “The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.” ~ Erland Josephson
- “Near the end of the 1700s, philosophers began to declare that humans were rational individuals. People were flattered by being recognized as individuals, and by being called rational, and the idea soon wormed its way into the belief systems of nearly everyone in the upper class. Despite resistance from Church and State, the idea of rational individuality replaced the assumption that truth comes only from god and king.” ~ Alex Pentland
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“They don’t hang dukes, darling. He’d be let off by reason of insanity. Everyone knows the upper classes are batty.” ~ Rhys Bowen
- “Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.” ~ Steven Pinker
- “In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?” ~ Mary McCarthy
- “The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths. Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper While farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn- all this is robbery and chaos. It is not in keeping with the Tao.” ~ Laozi
- “I’ve no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes’ work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my – hang on.” ~ Rowan Atkinson
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“How shall we ever know if it’s morning if there’s no servant to pull up the blinds?” ~ James M. Barrie
- “But it’s not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time – it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.” ~ Richard M. Nixon
- “I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a variant form of upper-class politics and self-privileging.” ~ Jack D. Forbes
- “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” ~ Elmer Eric Schattschneider
- “The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own.” ~ Antonio Gramsci
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“The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.” ~ Margaret Halsey
- “Politicians and bureaucrats are the new upper class in Norway. It is an upper class that is growing by an increasing number of top-paid politicians in municipalities and counties. They let the people suffer, but let themselves go free.” ~ Carl I. Hagen
- “Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.” ~ Toni Morrison
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“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.” ~ Caitlin Moran
- “I’m a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I’ve always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country’s history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.” ~ Lucas Neff
- “And that is true in 85 percent of kids; it’s kids who live in old, dilapidated, mostly urban housing. But that still leaves 15 percent of the cases that occur in middle- or upper-class families, usually associated with home renovations. People are sanding paint, removing banisters, cleaning up windowsills, and they don’t realize that they’re spewing lead dust around in the house. And then the kids get it.” ~ Deirdre Imus
