"Snobbery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discontent among the small material things of life, instead of uplifting themselves with the picture of the inevitable future when development had run its course, and indulgently pitying the children of their own period who so often made life hateful with their greed, selfishness, snobbery—most potent obstacle to human endeavor—and injustice. The bad judgment of the mass! How many careers it had balked, if not ruined, with its poor ideals, its mean heroes, its instinctive avoidance of superior qualities foreign to itself, its contemptible desire to be identified ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... the most thoroughbred human beings I have ever seen. No wonder the greatest snobs like her. There is nothing a snob hates so much as snobbery in another. Viva ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... ownership of this place didn't justify snobbery, when everyone must work together or die—and stepped off toward the nearest entry lock with that flowing spaceman's pace which always keeps one foot on the ground. Even so, he didn't unshackle his inward-reeling lifeline till he ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... disease of this century called 'snobbery of the soul.' Its germ has been virulently developed in modern cultures from the uncomplex bacillus isolated sixty years ago by the late William Makepeace Thackeray. Precisely as Major Ponto, with his plated dishes and stable-boy masquerading as footman, lied to himself and his guests so—but ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people were laughing over her most ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... when Lowell wrote, and there may even be to-day, a handful of royalty-worshippers in England who regard a Republic as a vulgar, unpicturesque form of government; but this is not a political opinion, or even prejudice, but mere stolid snobbery. Whatever were England's misdemeanours towards America at the time of the Civil War, they were not prompted by any ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... disappeared. The war has done little good, that I ever could discover, to any one, but it has delivered the souls of the Church of England clergy who went out to France from the worst form of ecclesiastical snobbery. There are few of those who tried to work in the army who preserve the spirit of social superiority which has had a good deal to do with the dislike of the Church, which has been I imagine, a much more effective cause of "our unhappy divisions" than ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. "He was in the railroad business," he returned cautiously. "His name ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "transparent honesty and complete fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century [the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there is more to be said—for instance, that Trelawny ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... morals, and religion, though deeply dyed in native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed, conceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among the northern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced than among the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery in society, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live on different intellectual planes and often have different religions. Some educated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... common knowledge," Dr. Cripps said; "but one about which, for reasons of policy, or, more truly, of snobbery, it is the fashion to keep silent. So, for goodness' sake, don't give me as your authority if you should ever have occasion to speak ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... zeal of a common purpose. Lines of demarcation are obliterated and they are drawn together because of their thinking and feeling in unison. The caste system does not thrive in the geography class and snobbery languishes. The pupils have the same books, the same assignments, the same teacher, and share alike in all the privileges and pleasures which the class provides. Their grades are given on merit, with no semblance of discrimination. In short, they achieve the democratic attitude ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... of which this great Commonwealth has grown and prospered; big, broad-minded, strong men who, whatever their failings—for they were very human—were generous to a fault, ever ready to listen to the cry of distress or help a fallen brother to his feet, scornful of pettiness, ignorant of snobbery, fair and square in their dealings with their fellows. Alas, that it should have come to "Hail and Farewell" to ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... you shouldn't cut your old friends now that you have risen in the world. That's what we call snobbery. ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... to Jane's smooth forehead. Reference to snobbery brought up a vision of Marian Seaton's ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... wealth of tenderness, sympathy, and kindliness existed! His affection for his graceless nephew Karl is a touching picture. With the rest of his family he had never been on very cordial terms. His feeling of contempt for snobbery and pretense is very happily illustrated in his relations with his brother Johann. The latter had acquired property, and he sent Ludwig his card, inscribed "Johann van Beethoven, land-owner." The caustic reply was a card, on which was written, "Ludwig ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... enthusiasms were all for cuneiform inscriptions. He had heard in a club of a hobo whose nails were clean, whose address was elegant and who had confounded surgeons on surgery, artists on art, poets on verse and theologues on theology. He knew that the circles which had soothed his artistic snobbery with an admiration as grateful as soft fingers on a cat's back held no letters patent on charm or cultivation and yet his own mind had catalogued women of the stage, off-stage, under a general heading, in some way associated with cabaret places and false gaiety. Here was one who ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... because they live in Hammersmith or Whitechapel. Have we ourselves not seen in our rooms rich and poor, artist and mechanic, writer and labourer? Nay, have we not had German clerk and Chinese aristocrat, German baron and Russian nihilist? What is it that permits us to dispense with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary of life to the people where the old Mate lives! I think it is lack of imagination in our women-folk, and the fetish of the home. For surely the utter antithesis of "home" ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... he thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence, and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's ill luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... dark beauty, her daring of speech and deed took Shakespeare by storm. She was his complement in every failing; her strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of pure snobbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble worship was not the way to win a high-spirited girl. He loved her so abjectly that he lost her; and it was undoubtedly his overpowering sensuality and snobbishness which brought him to ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... no question of keeping up impossible appearances, but a general frankness with regard to the fundamental values of clothing, food, and education that all shared alike and made no pretence about. Any faintest sign of snobbery, for instance, would have been drummed out of the little mountain hamlet at once by Gygi, the gendarme, who spent more time in his fields and vineyards than in his uniform. And, while every one knew that a title and large ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of its secular practitioners the holy virtues of an active piety, a modified chastity, and an unqualified obedience, at all events, to the categorical imperative. The obligation of poverty it omits, for the code arose at a time when the spiritual snobbery of the meek and lowly was not pressing the simile about the camel and the eye of the needle. It leads to charming manners and to delicate amenities. It is the opposite of the code of Gallantry, for while the code of Chivalry takes everything with a becoming ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... for a good time, and the atmosphere of good will and jollity was infectious. There was an utter absence of snobbery and affectation, and the boys were delighted to see how quickly the girls fell into the spirit of the gathering and with their own fun and high spirits added more than their quota to ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... village carpenter, was the possessor both of a Broadway Grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned to play on it. Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... little higher and her backbone just a little stiffer than that of the average colored person because of pride—family pride—in her people—her white people. And as one can readily see from her testimony, her chief cause for her pardonable snobbery seems to be that her Massa was the last man to surrender and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... devised especially for the preparation of youthful Russian nobility for their respective places in the military, possibly the official, world. As it presently turned out, these great schools were destined to become hot-beds of tyranny, intrigue, rivalry, caste-feeling, and snobbery in their worst forms. Hence, considering the certain future of each cadet, the Corps afforded an even more adequate preparation for bureaucratic methods than their creator had had reason to expect. In the Moscow ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... hands were against her and her hand against all men. When she had time to think about it, she fully recognized that most of the admiration and kindness tendered to her by the other passengers was entirely worthless, and merely the result of snobbery. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... ideals of applied art have remained the ideals of the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in their efforts at aesthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes even in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. Of course, if this ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to—the phrase is technical—to ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I regret to say, with a distinct coolness that did not seem to bother him in the least. He advanced into the room, holding out a large, red, and serviceable hand, evidently it had never dawned on him that there was such a thing in the world as snobbery. But Tom and I had been "coached" by Ralph Hambleton and Perry Blackwood, warned to be careful of our friendships. There was a Reason! In any case Mr. Krebs would not have appealed to us. In answer to a second question he was informed what city we hailed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... daughter. And thats the test, mind. Thats the test. You feel as I do. You are a snob in fact: I am a snob, not only in fact, but on principle. I shall go down in history, not as the first snob, but as the first avowed champion of English snobbery, and its first martyr in the army. The navy boasts two such martyrs in Captains Kirby and Wade, who were shot for refusing to fight under Admiral Benbow, a promoted cabin boy. I have always envied ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... development of talent, to obstruct the natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations,—such ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now the ark that floats triumphant over the democratic wave; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it when the waters ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... have a system ready to replace all the other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization of childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions for children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set free to roam and play ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw |
