Class and Courtesy

Actually I vote Labour, but my butler’s a Tory.
Earl Mountbatten to a canvasser during the 1945 election

The difference between us is that my family begins with me, whereas yours ends with you.
Iphicrates, Athenian general and the son of a cobbler, replying to a descendant of the Athenian hero Harmodius who mocked his lowly origins

Of course they have, or I wouldn’t be talking to you.
Barbara Cartland, when asked by BBC reporter Sandra Harris in a radio interview whether she thought English class barriers had broken down

You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school.
Saki

Aristocrats spend their childhood being beaten by fierce nannies and their later years murdering wildlife, so it’s hardly surprising their sex lives are a bit cock-eyed.
Jilly Cooper, Men and Super Men

In the British aristocracy the gene pool has always had a shallow end.
Former US ambassador Raymond Seitz

The English aristocracy is a wonderful institution, not for its power, which is nothing, nor for its achievements, which are few, but for the gigantic impression it is able to make upon weak minds. Practically, its power has dwindled to the prerogative of occasionally obstructing a theological measure for a limited period … [but it is] one of the stock nightmares of morbid brains. It takes its place with Antichrist and irremissible sin among the dismal spectres that haunt a disturbed imagination.
Lord Salisbury

He was educated at Eton and at Oxford, so Watson, bring the gun.
Sherlock Holmes

These bloody people. I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is.
Prince Charles on Royal Correspondent, Nicholas Witchell

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Mark Twain

Good manners is the art of making people uncomfortable.
Craig Brown

How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them past the test?
The Duke of Edinburgh to a driving instructor in Scotland

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.
Nancy Mitford, Noblesse Oblige

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species – …

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom

standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable –

And a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life

sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.

Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside

just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow

under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings

rather nasty –

How beastly the bourgeois is! …

D.H. Lawrence, Pansies, How beastly the bourgeois is

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
Hermann Hesse

Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt, but he won’t like God.
Robert Louis Stevenson on Matthew Arnold

Let them eat cake.
Marie-Antoinette repeating an old saying when told the people had no bread to eat

Voting and buying drugs: the two activities that will drag a professional person into a place where people live on land owned by the council.
Giles Coren in The Times

If you’ve seen one city slum you’ve seen them all.
Spiro T. Agnew

MY LORD, – Now I am recovering from an illness of several months’ duration, aggravated no little by your lordship’s rude reception of me at the Cascine, in presence of my family and innumerable Florentines. I must remind you in the gentlest terms of the occurrence. We are both of us old men, my lord, and are verging on decrepitude and imbecility. Else my note might be more energetic. I am not unobservant of distinctions. You, by the favour of a minister, are Marquis of Normanby, I by the grace of God am.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
W.S. Landor, letter to Lord Normanby, who had cut him

I’ve been offered titles, but I think they get one into disreputable company.
George Bernard Shaw

When you are down and out, something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.
Orson Welles

Not really. Experience has taught us that those who matter don’t mind and those who mind don’t matter.
Ambassador to a dinner guest who had forced her fellow guests to swap seats after discovering precedence ought to accord her a place closer to the Ambassador. She had said to him: ‘I expect you find these questions of precedence very troublesome, Your Excellency.’

We invite people like that to tea, but we don’t marry them.
Lady Chetwode on her future son-in-law, John Betjeman

I would rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on your bicycle.
Chinese reality TV contestant

What you need is a couple of aspirates.
F.E. Smith to Jimmy Thomas, who never pronounced his h’s. He had complained of an ’eadache

No writer before the middle of the 19th century wrote about the working classes other than a grotesque or as pastoral decoration. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.
Evelyn Waugh

Like most liberals, I will do anything for the working classes, anything – apart from mix with them.
Kevin Day

I never knew the working classes had such white skins.
Lord Curzon, seeing some troops bathing during the First World War