Quotes / Upper-Class Twit

Literature

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one...At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.

—The Long Goodbye

"It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful, and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone."

—Aunt Agatha, in the aptly-named Jeeves and Wooster story "Aunt Agatha Speaks Her Mind".

Most of my work has lain amongst these people. What they call the upper classes, I mean. You see, the majority of people are always wondering what the neighbours will think. But tramps and aristocrats don’t—they just do the first thing that comes into their heads, and they don’t bother to think what anyone thinks of them. I’m not meaning just the idle rich, the people who give big parties, and so on, I mean those that have had it born and bred in them for generations that nobody else’s opinion counts but their own. I’ve always found the upper classes the same—fearless, truthful and sometimes extraordinarily foolish.

—Superintendent Battle, The Secret of Chimneys

Live Action Film

Arthur: I hate it here!
Hobson: Of course you hate it. People work here.

—Arthur (1981)

"You're the sort that built the Empire. How did you do it without thinking?"

— These Are the Damned

Music

There are soldiers, sailors
Stuntmen, jailers
Jewelers, G-men
Unless your daddy's rich
You need an-ah
You need an-ah
You need an occupation

—Sparks, "Occupation"

''Here you see the pick of us,
You may be heartily sick of us,
Still with sense, we're all imbued,
We know how Caesar conquered Gaul,
And how to whack a Cricket ball,
Apart from this our education,
Lacks co-ordination

—Noël Coward, "The Stately Homes of England"

Video Games

Look at my hands, Mister Conagher. I have never worked a day in my life with them. They are the smooth hands of a baby. I have mounted an epic campaign of leisure against the ravages of time. Waiting for nature to do to my brother what my men could not.

— Blutarch Mann, Team Fortress 2

Smelly Unfortunate: Please, sir... May I have a hat?
Gentle Manne of Leisure: A-ha-ha! You are as PRESUMPTUOUS as you are POOR and IRISH. Tarnish notte the Majesty of my TOWER of HATS.

— An EDITORIAL CARTOON of SOME INSIGHTE, Team Fortress 2

"I don't understand why the poor can't just eat the other poor!"

— Upper-Cruster, Streets of Rogue

Web Comics

I don’t understand the poor. Why don’t they just give money to their butlers and have them fetch food? Why are they so helpless?

—Captain Rich, Flork of Cows

Web Original

There have always been and will always be celebrities who are famous for nothing. The fact that they exist tends to baffle and infuriate industrious people, but that's a good thing — uniting in our disgust of objectively terrible people is how we won World War II.

—Seanbaby

When you ask Kate to get a real job, she says the same shit my abuelita would tell the border guards after they asked to see her papers: NO SE? US Citizen.

—Michael K.

Ellen apparently needs to ask bestie George W. Bush about prison conditions, because she’s not up to date.

—DListed, "Ellen DeGeneres Pissed Off The Internet By Comparing Isolation In Her Luxury Mansion To Jail"

North Texas, in particular, is home to a hybrid species of rednecks and overentitled suburbanites that thinks a pandemic is something you can return to Nordstrom if you bitch loudly enough at the clerk about it.

—Drew Magary, "Why Your Team Sucks: Dallas Cowboys"

Real Life

Frank Longford quite useless. Mental age of 12.

—Harold Wilson on the Seventh Earl of Longford

The Duke's riveting stupidity was of a perfection seldom seen outside institutions.

—Gore Vidal on the Duke of Windsor, Palimpsest

"When told he was upsetting the other passengers, [he] said, "I will own fucking anyone on this flight. They are fucking peasants." And, when the crew finally had to physically restrain him, he said, "My father will pay this out. He’s done it before." Kind of makes you think, "Why can’t we book this kid on a Malaysian airliner?"

—Real Time with Bill Maher, on Conrad Hughes Hilton III.

---