"Upper class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Passing through Constantinople in 1843 he accepts a post as schoolmaster at Trnovo, but is immediately at loggerheads with the Greek bishop and departs. Returning to his birthplace he is irritated by the pride and harshness of the upper class, and he attempts to make the people rise against them. They charge him with being a disturber of the peace. "He has travelled through Europe," says their complaint to the Government, "and now in this town he bestrides a horse, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... with almost the whole Faculty enlisted, foreseeing the need of surgeons turned its whole force to training the upper classmen, and the Law School so arranged its programme that twelve hours a week were given over to drill. The upper class medical, engineering, and dental students were also enlisted as reserves ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... thing at all." And, understanding her pain and her uneasiness—they who had mothers, too, there at home—they rendered her a thousand little services. She loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the peasantry have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class alone. The humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and because every new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in masses, who make the true cannon's prey because they are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper class—though we must allow for many honourable exceptions—was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... soul of the student self-government movement, for it recognizes not only the obligation placed upon its members by an institution, but also the wide influence one girl may have on others. Student government knows that upper class girls can determine the spirit of the under classes. Even looking at the matter from the lightest point of view, respectful and law-abiding ways are always ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... reform, and a too great leaning toward European habits and associates, roused the animosity of the people, and of the conservative party in the upper class. The Sultan's eldest brother, who had been set aside in his favour, was intriguing against him; the usual Cherifian Pretender was stirring up the factious tribes in the mountains; and the European powers were attempting, in the confusion of an ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... is a believer. And if in saying so it should follow, that even the Devil has more religion than some of our men of fame can at this time be charged with, I hope my Lord —— and his Grace the —— of —— and some of the upper class in the red-hot club, will not wear the coat, however well it may sit to their shapes, or challenge the Satyr, as if it were pointed at them, because 'tis due to them: In a word, whatever their Lordships are, I can assure them that the ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... Irish poor, what the large devil with a black face was to the Scotch poor—the poetry of life. In the same way in England we have an aristocracy instead of a Government. We rely on a certain good humour and education in the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution. No educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that he has to administer. In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad people. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... landlord. His house was in the country; in the city he had only a lodging for the purpose of attending to his business there, and perhaps of breathing the purer air that prevailed there during the hot season. Above all, however, these arrangements furnished a moral basis for the relation between the upper class and the common people, and so materially lessened its dangers. The free tenants-on-sufferance, sprung from families of decayed farmers, dependents, and freedmen, formed the great bulk of the proletariate,(13) and were not much more dependent on the landlord than the petty leaseholder ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... is a native of Egypt and Arabia, and produces a fruit of almost the same substance as that of the Melon. In Egypt it is esteemed by the upper class natives, as well as by Europeans, as the most ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... dignified manners they gradually acquired and retain, to a great extent, to the present day. The other caste—the Illiterates—were dependents of the Intellectuals. Without mental training, with few wants, and little expenses, they were as contented, in their sphere, as the upper class were in theirs. Like their masters, they had their hopes, but they never knew what misery was, as one understands it in Europe, and in this felicitous, ambitionless condition, they never urgently demanded education, even ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... suspicions of one another. For it was about this time, or even before, that the democracy was put down at Athens. When Pisander and the envoys returned from Tissaphernes to Samos they at once strengthened still further their interest in the army itself, and instigated the upper class in Samos to join them in establishing an oligarchy, the very form of government which a party of them had lately risen to avoid. At the same time the Athenians at Samos, after a consultation among themselves, determined to let Alcibiades alone, since ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... strong personality, with a great interest in the world led by a dominant aspiration of some sort; and Josephine, in her heart, loved power and admired those who possessed it. Political power especially had that charm for her which it has for most English people of the upper class. There is some quality in the English race which breeds an inordinate admiration for all kinds of superiority: it is certain that if one class of English society can be justly accused of an over-great ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... if this should nowadays amaze Friends, let them but look in the "Observer," and see what manner of finery was advertised in 1778 as stole from our friend, Sarah Fisher, sometime Sarah Logan, a much respected member of Meeting. In this, as in all else, my mother had her way, and, like some of the upper class of Quakers, wore at times such raiment as fifty years later would have surely brought about a visit from ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... been forced to yield theoretical equality to almost the entire nation, while still retaining real authority in their own hands. They have seen a middle class coquetting with a lower class in order to force an upper class to share with it its privileges, and an upper class resorting in its turn to the same alliance; and they may have noted something more than a superficial resemblance between the tactics of the patres and nobiles of Rome and ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... and magnificent organization, not a cataclysm, precipitated by the impact of barbarous forces, but a process slowly prepared and evolved by internal and economic causes." Two of these causes were the dying out of municipal liberty and self-government, and the separation of the upper class from the masses by sharp distributions of wealth and privilege. It is indeed true that these causes contributed to Rome's ruin; that the central government was weak; that the civil service was oppressive ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... in their cages about the colonnade around the court, and Bell found Paula being introduced to a pale young man in the stiff collar and unspeakably formal morning clothes of the South American who is of the upper class. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... pointed at him in the crowd? Did all men flee his presence till he found Life too intolerable? Nay; not so! Death came too close upon the heels of crime, He had but done what all his tribe deemed just: All the great mass—I mean the upper class— The Rabbis, all the Pharisees and Priests Ay, and the lower mob as well who cried, "Give us Barabbas! Christus to the cross!" These men were all of them on Judas's side, And Judas had done naught against the law. Were he this villain, he had but to say, "I followed Christus ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... governing than meddle with it themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models for refinement. But there is vastly more besides this, and his value lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details than in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations. He leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... spiritual things. Only an animal could be confronted with the pageant of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence of Death, and not be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of these sublime mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular has returned to the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic, the educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do, and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the world ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... earth from Rome—even if the passing is a temporary social phenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when the working class is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle class as Kansas City and Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the upper class, the ruling class of other centuries, is weaker than it is elsewhere in the world. They tell you flippantly that the king is training his son to run for president. The high caste Romans have an Austrian pride, that "goeth before ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... all its fine cognomen, was little better than any of the numerous taverns that kept discreet half-open doors to the wynds and closes of the Duke's burgh town, but custom made it a preserve of the upper class in the community. There it was the writers met their clients and cozened them into costly law pleas over the genial jug or chopine; the through-going stranger took his pack there and dwelt cheaply in the attics that looked upon the bay and upon the little harbour where traffic dozed upon the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the school-room, where Mdlle. Perier gave a French lesson to the upper class. Hester belonged to no class at present, and could look around her, and have plenty of time to reflect on her own miseries, and particularly on what she now considered the favoritism shown ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... and we gave him the rear tenement and slum politics. If he accepted the standard, whose fault was it? His being in such a hurry to vote that he could not wait till the law made him a citizen was no worse, to my mind, than the treachery of the "upper class" native, who refuses to go to the polls for fear he may rub up against him there. This last let us settle with first, and see what remains of our problem. We can approach it honestly, then, at ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... of Japanese history down to the second half of the seventeenth century, the canons and customs were dictated solely by the upper class, and neither merchants nor artisans were recognized as possessing any social or literary influence whatever. But in the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu—the Genroku period, as it is commonly called—the tradesman became a comparatively conspicuous figure. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... mother was dead. The father died suddenly of apoplexy, and Miss Edith Winser came into possession of the millions. Then he had spoken and been accepted. Conscious that her husband, talented as he was, would not be accepted, without a hard struggle, by the upper class, they decided to ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... think that the bad in democracy predominates over the good, or the good over the bad, a question which I shall not attempt to decide, the popular balderdash about it corresponds to no real conviction. The upper class has never believed in it; the middle class has the strongest reasons to hate and fear it. But how about the lower class, in whose interests the whole machine is supposed to have been set going? The working man has no respect for either ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... careless of her dress, well bred and quite reckless of her breeding, well mannered and yet appallingly outspoken and indifferent to the opinion of her interlocutory, amiable and yet peremptory, arbitrary, and high-tempered to the last bearable degree, and withal a very typical managing matron of the upper class, treated as a naughty child until she grew into a scolding mother, and finally settling down with plenty of practical ability and worldly experience, limited in the oddest way with domestic and class limitations, conceiving the universe exactly as if it were a large house in Wilton Crescent, ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... gown, or walk with a cane, or appear out of his room without being completely dressed, and with his hat; and whenever a Freshman either speaks to a superior or is spoken to by one, he shall keep his hat off until he is bidden to put it on. A Freshman shall not play with any members of an upper class, without being asked; nor is he permitted to use any acts of familiarity with them, even ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... children moved to an upper class, Mr. Bird was laid away, but the children requested his presence. So he entered the new room and became a farmer. He had now to write letters, to arrange rents, etc., and the money had to be made and counted. The letters ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... or more exactly, the upper class of thieves, which is the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the aristocracy of the tribe, had, in 1816, after the peace which made life hard for so many men, formed an association called les grands fanandels—the Great Pals—consisting of the most noted master-thieves and certain bold spirits at that time ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... their individual intelligence, industry, and moral worth. So long as everything is not strictly in accordance with our principles of democracy, so long as there is in any part of the country an aristocratic upper class who despise labor, and a laboring lower class that is denied equal political rights, so long this grinding and discord between the two will never cease in America. It will make trouble not only in the South, but in the North,—trouble between all employers ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... form used by Europeans in conversation with natives of all classes, and by natives of the upper class in addressing Europeans. ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... custom is the reverse of profitable; but it keeps up an air of lordship, and is therefore retained. Late in the afternoon, when the new portion of the Alameda is in shadow, and swept by a delicious breeze from the sea, it begins to be frequented by the people; but I noticed that very few of the upper class made their appearance. So grave and sombre are these latter, that one would fancy them descended from the conquered Moors, rather than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... in Ireland is this, that whereas in England it is the upper class principally that is militarist, in Ireland it is principally the lower class, and whereas it is the Castle authorities who are always preaching the iniquity of physical force, it is the lower classes who ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... to dine with the Hares that evening. They lived in a large house on a fashionable 'road' as certain, of the streets were called. It was a typical upper class, English home. There were many fine old things in it but no bright colors, nothing to dazzle or astonish; you like the wooden Indian in war-paint and feathers and the stuffed bear and high colored rugs in the parlor of Mr. Gosport in Philadelphia. Every piece of furniture was ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... dyed-in-the-wool fans, a few newspaper men, and a sprinkling of thrill-seekers from other walks of life far removed from the prize-ring. Jimmy often noticed women among the spectators—well-dressed women, with every appearance of refinement, and there were always men of the same upper class of society. ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the organization of the constitution, and the many were in slavery to the few, the people rose against the upper class. The strife was keen, and for a long time the two parties were ranged in hostile camps against one another, till at last, by common consent, they appointed Solon to be mediator and Archon, and committed the whole constitution to his ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... standards and its justification and vindication by combat, present so many resemblances to the practice of dueling and the idea of personal honor once so generally held by the upper class, and still existent where the military spirit prevails, that we ought to study the dueling code with reference to the psychology of war. There are psychological features that appear to be identical. The idea of personal ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... were now laid down and Edmund struggled to his feet. Before him stood a tall and handsome man in the attire of a person of the upper class. The old peasant was explaining to him the manner of their capture of the prisoners, and the reason why they had ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... you, then go ahead and be fresh—-of course, not too fresh! Mix in with the upper classmen, all of you, if you want to. Have your opinions, and don't be afraid to let 'em out—-if you can't hold in any longer. To the upper class dances this winter Dick & Co. shall have a bid—-if you'll all learn how to walk and glide across a waxed floor. Remember, when you're among the fellows, you don't have to keep in the back freshmen row—-but see to it that you don't encourage general mutiny in your class ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... was not packed, but comfortably filled. Of course we had an Irish programme which was just the right key note and the people gave us a hearty reception and many recalls. After the concert, friends came in carriages and took us to the St. Patrick's ball given by the upper class of Irish citizens. It was my first experience at an Irish ball. I did not retire until two o'clock in the morning, pretty well convinced that the Gaelic dancers are people to enjoy their fun to the utmost. March 18th. At the matinee this afternoon a very laughable episode occurred. After singing ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... spring that he had anticipated, the two figures stopped suddenly, exchanged a word in Welsh, and then dropped their cloaks. To Oswald's astonishment, two young women stood before him. They evidently belonged to the upper class. Both were richly dressed. They wore heavy gold chains round their necks, and bracelets of the same metal; set, as Oswald noticed by the reflection of the moon, with jewels. They had also brooches, and their girdles were held in with massive ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... sorts of good, but not, I think, that particular good, of supreme importance, which results from Lady Ogram's activity. In the rustics' eyes, it would be merely a new device for filling up the ranks of cooks and housemaids, to the sole advantage of an upper class. Of course that view is altogether wrong, but it would be held. The paper-mill, being quite a novel enterprise, excites new thoughts. It offers the independence these people desire, and yet it exacts an obvious discipline. It establishes a social group corresponding exactly to the ideal ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... as Brahmos are in deepest accord with the movement. And it must, moreover, be remembered that the influence of the society is far in excess of the numbers represented. For the movement has drawn its membership, almost exclusively, from the upper class; and the majority of Brahmos are men of education and of position in society. Moreover, they joined this movement under the deep conviction of the utter worthlessness of Hinduism as a way of salvation, and ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... own father was a student at the Petrograd University at that time. Left wing inclined, in fact. I think he belonged to Kerensky's Social Democrats. At any rate, in spite of his upper class background he made out all right for a time. In fact he became an instructor and our early life wasn't particularly bad." Paul cleared his throat. "Until the purges in the 1930s. It was decided that my father ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... five of them in all here. Only one is of the upper class, the rest are all artisans. The one nearest the door—a tall, lean workman with shining red whiskers and tear-stained eyes—sits with his head propped on his hand, staring at the same point. Day and night he grieves, shaking ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... man in black; 'only those think them so who don't know them. The male part of the upper class are in youth a set of heartless profligates; in old age, a parcel of poor, shaking, nervous paillards. The female part, worthy to be the sisters and wives of such wretches—unmarried, full of cold vice, kept under by vanity and ambition, but which, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... yet little has been done to ameliorate this degradation. Ignorance prevails everywhere. Even of the young people of the peasant class more than eighty per cent. can neither read nor write. There is no middle class. The gulf between the upper class and the lower is so wide as to be absolutely impassable. And for the most part the upper class is quite content to have ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... most interesting inquiry. We know what his audiences were. He wrote for the people, and the theatre in his day was a popular amusement for the multitude, probably more than it was a recreation for those who enjoyed the culture of letters. A taste for letters was prevalent among the upper class, and indeed was fashionable among both ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this the court of Elizabeth set the fashion. The daughter of the duchess was taught not only to distill strong waters, but to construe Greek. When the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... big lower class is poor because the little upper class takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make. Oh, it ain't the upper class's fault. They do it because they're ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down here is ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... his lameness, he grew so well and strong that when he was about eight years old he was placed with his brothers in the upper class of the Edinburgh grammar school, known as the High School. Though he had had some lessons in Latin with a private tutor, he was behind his class in this subject, and being a high-spirited and sensitive boy, he felt rather keenly this disadvantage. Perhaps the fact that he could ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... too, as all of her class are; and who could give her a better synopsis of the private affairs of half the families in Wimbledon, than Dilly Danforth, the washerwoman, who performed the drudgery and slop-work in many of the fine homes of the upper class? But, after all, Peggy had more to give than receive; for by some means the poor washerwoman did not seem possessed of the "gift of gab." She was lamentably ignorant on many points where Peggy thought, with her advantages, she would have been well-informed and ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... control of matter. Her children are not drudges and slaves. The Constitution has declared it, and the spirit of our institutions has confirmed it. The best the land can teach them they shall know. They shall learn that there is no upper class in their country, and no lower, and they shall understand how it is that God and ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... I encountered mistrust; here I was trusted. There I was under restraint; here I had liberty. Hitherto I had hardly ever been with boys of my own age; here I found forty schoolfellows, for I joined the upper class of the town school.[13] ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... yearly) to his leader (cneaz) as recompense for his leadership in peace and war. The latter, moreover, solely enjoyed the privilege of carrying on the occupations of miller and innkeeper, and the peasant was compelled to mill with him. When after the foundation of the principalities the upper class was established on a feudal basis, the peasantry were subjected to constantly increasing burdens. Impoverished and having in many cases lost their land, the peasants were also deprived at the end of the sixteenth century of their freedom of movement. By that time the cneaz, from being the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... a quiet, sad place, so poor that the streets are badly lighted, seldom cleaned, and have a desolate, neglected appearance. The few families of the upper class who live there belong to what is called the petite noblesse; there is almost no trade or commerce; and many of the lower ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... slaves, in much the same condition as the Russian serfs before the late emancipation took place. They were acknowledged retainers, owing their service to, and holding their farms at the option of the upper class; namely, the so-called nobility of the country. This overmastering class prided itself on the fact of neither promoting nor being engaged in any kind of business; indeed, this uselessness was one condition attached to its patent of nobility. These autocratic rulers knew no other interest ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... is another question in Africa upon which our "ignorant" Labour class is far better informed than our dear old eighteenth-century upper class which still squats so firmly in our Foreign and Colonial Offices, and that is the question of forced labour. We cannot tolerate any possibilities of the enslavement of black Africa. Long ago the United States found out the impossibility of having slave ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... the Fens that their old, if irregular, privileges should be confirmed. It was argued for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been quietly absorbed by the Family while there was no king in England: but there happened in this case what happened in every other since the upper class, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed the tyranny of the King—Charles capitulated. Then followed (of course) popular rising; it was quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom against the Stuart dynasty was ended, the peasants had been taught their place, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... negro blood predominates. Coloured people also exercise the different handicrafts; the town supports two goldsmiths, who are mulattoes, and have each several apprentices; the blacksmiths are chiefly Indians, as is the case generally throughout the province. The manners of the upper class (copied from those of Para) are very stiff and formal, and the absence of the hearty hospitality met with in other places, produces a disagreeable impression at first. Much ceremony is observed in the intercourse of the principal people with each other, and with ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... the parts together with such tenacity that fresh fractures are likely to be caused in undoing a portion, a process often very necessary; professional repairers will tell you "it tears the wood too much." The glues mostly in favour among upper class repairers are those known as Russian, Cologne and Isinglass, all good; they are light in colour, very firm, not too brittle, and transparent. There are other varieties to be had of excellent quality and which conform to the conditions ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... place, that although my mother succeeded in making her other houses easy and indeed charming to live in, I have never known what it was to have a home. And indeed I cannot at this moment call to mind a single New York family of the upper class that lives in ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... your like have your fixed ideas of the upper class and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not interested in any other, and, indeed, you know ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... apply to a class, unfortunately a very numerous one, of the existence of which none are more painfully conscious than the good among the Americans themselves. Of the upper class of merchants, manufacturers, shipbuilders, &c., it would be difficult to speak too highly. They have acquired a world-wide reputation for their uprightness, punctuality, and honourable ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... attention. Something exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly trained women of the upper class, these raffinees of the world, may be for those who understand them—a stimulus, an ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of all plebes the yearlings and other upper class men keep themselves loftily apart, except when compelled to drill the plebes or perform other military or other official ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... contempt for the multitude. He is one born into a high tradition of life. He has the courage, the skill in arms, and the talent for affairs that come with high birth in the manly races. He has also the faith in tradition that makes an unlettered upper class narrow and obstructionist. Like the rich in France before the Revolution, he despises the poor. He denies them the right to complain of their hunger. Rather than grant them that right, or the means of urging redress, he would ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... territory inhabited 97% by aliens, constituting the natural geographical frontier of another nation, never historically a part of Ruritania. But one of the provinces which had been federated into Ruritania had formerly traded in those markets, and the upper class culture was Ruritanian. On the principle of cultural superiority and the necessity of defending civilization, the lands were claimed. Finally, there was a port wholly disconnected from Ruritania geographically, ethnically, economically, historically, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... had no idea of anything but virtue in the Atherly blood; he had heard that the upper class of Europeans were fond of field sports and of hunting; it was odd that his sister should inherit this propensity and not he. He regarded her more kindly for this evidence of race. "You think of getting married?" he said more gently, yet ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... a man of the upper class, in England, scorn at a working man because he appeared in his working dress in the National Gallery in London?—I have certainly seen working ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... vagabond; but with his rise into society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats; and conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognise the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... general, when men are dominated by the zest for action, and when cities have become sufficiently large to keep the theaters well filled. It is also the natural form in such a period as that of the Restoration, when literary life centers about a frivolous upper class who demand an easy and social form of entertainment. But the condition is very different when, as in the eighteenth and still more in the nineteenth century, the habit of reading, and some recognition of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... whites, and twenty-four were arrested and thrown into prison. Elated with her success, she began to ascend in the social scale, and criminated some persons of the highest social standing in the city, whose characters were above suspicion. This was turning the tables on them in a manner the upper class did not expect, and they began to reflect what the end might be. The testimony that was sufficient to condemn the slaves was equally conclusive against them. The stake and the gallows which the court had erected for the black man, it could not pull down because a white gentleman ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... not disposed to take a false view of my own social position. I belonged, at most, to the class of small proprietors, as they existed in the last century, and filled a very useful and respectable niche between the yeoman and gentleman, considering the last strictly in reference to the upper class of that day. Now, it struck me that Emily Merton, with her English notions, might very well draw the distinctions Rupert had mentioned; nor am I conscious of having cared much about it, though she did. If I were a less ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... probably, as regards all its customs and associations, than any other well-established place that could be named. With six hundred thousand souls, collected from all parts of Christendom—with no upper class recognized by, or in any manner connected with, the institutions, it would seem that the circles might enact their own laws, and the popular principle be brought to bear socially on the usages of the town—referring fashion ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... character, while they retained all the hardness of the fanatic and the feelings of Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people. 'I have eaten with them,' said one, 'drunk with them, fought with them; but I never prayed with them.' Their descendants became, probably, the very worst upper class with which a country was ever afflicted. The habits of the Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus. Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... side. This gentleman was lording it in true caricature fashion, with a Lord Dundreary drawl and a general execration of everything; while I sat in the chimney corner, speculating on the reason why many of the upper class of my countrymen—"High Toners," as they are called out here—make themselves so ludicrously absurd. They neither know how to hold their tongues or to carry their personal pretensions. An American is nationally assumptive, an Englishman personally ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the wife's exemption gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it, until it includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as from handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property becomes massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional standard of wealth of the upper class rises. The same tendency to exemption from handicraft, and in the course of time from menial domestic employments, will then assert itself as regards the other wives, if such there are, and also as regards other servants in immediate attendance upon the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... is not intended to picture Balzac as a preux chevalier, for he was far from being one. Even in the most refined of salons, he displayed his Rabelaisian manners and costume, and remained the typical author of the Contes drolatiques; but to maintain that he never knew women of the upper class or never even entered their society, involves a misapprehension of the facts. Neither would the present writer give the impression that this was the only class of women he knew or associated with, for he certainly was acquainted with many of the bourgeoisie and of the peasant class; ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... I beheld again with pleasure that large room on the ground floor, with the doors leading to the seven classes, where I had passed nearly every day for three years. There was a throng; the teachers were going and coming. My schoolmistress of the first upper class greeted me from the door of the ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... This apparently profitable machine permitted the miller to efficiently separate wheat flour into three components: bran, germ and endosperm. Since bread made without bran and germ is lighter and appears more "upper class" it became instantly popular. Flour without germ and bran also had an industrial application—it could be stored virtually forever without being infested by insects because white flour does not contain enough nutrition to support life. Most health conscious people are aware that white flour ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... in the ministry I am trying to teach my people to have higher ideals. We have to bring our race to that high ideal of race integrity. I am trying to keep the negro from thinking he is hated by the upper class of white people. What the negro needs is self-consciousness to the extent that he aspires to the higher principles in order to stand on an equal plane in attainment but ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... of the contingent fell into line, so great was the habit of obedience. This meekness on the part of the populace enticed the government into practices even more illegal and more dangerous withal, in that they struck at the upper class; for after forcibly enlisting men who had been exempted by lot, the same measure was applied to those who had quite legally paid for a replacement, and they were forced into the army, although some families ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... as Abati of the upper class, we were taken to the gates of the barrack, where we found a long train of riding camels waiting for us. The moment that I saw these beasts I knew that they were the best in the whole land, and of very great ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Charleston is the last stronghold of a unified American upper class; the last remaining American city in which Madeira and Port and noblesse oblige are fully and widely understood, and are employed according to ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... kingdom of Poland, the largest country in Europe with the exception of Russia. The Poles, as has been said before, were a Slavic people, distant cousins of the Russians and Bohemians. They had a strong nobility or upper class, but these nobles were jealous of each other, and as a result, the country was torn apart by many warring factions. The condition of the working class was very miserable. The nobles did not allow them any privileges. ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... circulating libraries in Oxford Street, and these thoroughfares are thronged with the lower middle-class, therefore the lower middle-class buys or hires books. In my industrial group the institutions and machinery perfected by the upper class for itself do not exist at all, and one may watch the lower without danger of being led to false conclusions by the accidental propinquity of phenomena that have really nothing whatever to ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... dressing and simple clothes for children, and they knew I had three children and no more money than they. And they know that my husband began his business career as a puddler, just as their sons are beginning now. In short, since the laboring class can't, seemingly, help itself, and the upper class can't help it, the situation seems to be waiting for just such people as we are, who ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the embryo stand to each other. For, from its first appearance, the warrior-class, headed by chiefs, is that by which the external acts of the society are carried on: alike in war, in negotiation, and in migration. Afterwards, while this upper class grows distinct from the lower, and at the same time becomes more and more exclusively regulative and defensive in its functions, alike in the persons of kings and subordinate rulers, priests, and soldiers; the inferior class becomes more and ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... cultivation of special aptitudes. "Our great Universities," he said, "Oxford and Cambridge, do next to nothing towards this end. They are, as Signor Mateucci called them, hauts lycees; and, though invaluable in their way as places where the youth of the upper class prolong to a very great age, and under some very valuable influences, their school-education, yet, with their college and tutor system, nay, with their examination and degree system, they are still, in fact, schools, and do not carry education beyond the stage of general and school education." ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... sought outside the world of fashion. In other countries it is very different. The circle of social caste, whose centre you touch in London, radiates to the farthest shores of the British empire; the upper class controls, not merely fashion, but government; it rules in country as well as city; genius and wealth are but its tributaries. Wherever it is not so, it is because England is so far Americanized. But in America the social prestige of the cities is nothing ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... on a visit to Alfred, read in the Columbus papers of the different classes of people composing its citizenship. "You have the upper class, the middle class, the lower class." When Uncle Madison was asked if the people of Virginia were not designated by classes, he replied: "No sir! No sir! We only have one class of people in Virginia—the high class. All the ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... of their own choosing. But neither this body, nor its successors, nor even the Congress that assembled the following year, could establish a permanent and effective government. Nowhere in Spanish America, perhaps, did the lower classes count for so little, and the upper class for so much, as in Chile. Though the great landholders were disposed to favor a reasonable amount of local autonomy for the country, they refused to heed the demands of the radicals for complete independence and the establishment of a republic. Accordingly, in proportion as their opponents resorted ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... years of age, wearing the working livery of servants of the upper class,—the long striped waistcoat with sleeves, and the white linen apron,—was going from door ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class, and in a consideration of these classes we shall look for an answer to the question. The upper class consists of those who have made extraordinary progress, morally, religiously, mentally and materially; who have outstripped their fellows in the race ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the first class, the latter torment their children in a naive way, while the former are infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely is a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who through the blitheness, the goodness, and joyousness of her character, makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and holidays into festivals. Such artists are often simple women who have ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... is often for a time in doubt. Yet as the accredited painter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain he contributed an essential element to the development of realistic fiction. No one has rendered so well as he the high-strung, neuropathic women of the upper class, who neither understand themselves nor are wholly comprehensible to others. In 'Monsieur de Camors', crowned by the Academy, he has yielded to the demands of a stricter realism. Especially after the fall of the Empire had removed a powerful motive for gilding the vices of aristocratic ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... wrong. Good Lord, it's about the most interesting thing I've ever heard. I didn't know anybody could escape from that awful sort of prison-house in which our—I'm English now—in which our upper class immures itself. Yet you've done it. I take it that the ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... the luxury she might have had—for, they had married men, of "the right sort"—"capable husbands"—men who had been more or less attentive to her—now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper class honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... over to the lawn in front of the manor-house, out of temptation's way. It was plain that her thoughts were still on the apple trees and the gooseberry bushes, for she never even glanced at the prettily dressed children of the upper class or at the beautiful flowers. Jan could not get her to listen to the fine speeches delivered by the Dean of Bro and Engineer Boraeus of Borg, in honour of the day. Why she would not even listen ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... to be able to see anything but a confession of failure in going without. In the same way, the 'Simple Life,' when led by the rich, wears to the poverty-struck an aspect of masked meanness—a matter far less tolerable in the eyes of the pauper than the traditional splendour of extravagance in the upper class, an extravagance that feeds more than the famished stomach with the crumbs ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... behind the counter, he went and married for his second wife a farmer's daughter. She was an honest, sensible, comely young woman, but she had no pretensions to be a lady, and no more inclination to enter the society of the Redcross upper class than the upper class had a mind to receive her as an equal. Charles Robinson's first wife had been all very well, though she was penniless. She had been a curate's daughter, educated to fill the post of governess ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... been treated as a dog, and then, far worse, far, far worse and more difficult to bear with dignity, as a child. A beefsteak? Oh, the shame that seared his soul as he thought of it! This revolting specimen of the upper class had declared, with a hateful smile of indulgent superiority, that all his love, all his sufferings, all his just indignation, depended solely for their existence on whether he did or did not eat a beefsteak. Could coarse-mindedness and gross insensibility ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... drive home Apries II. (Hophra), the Egyptian ally of Zedekiah. The city was taken, the king's sons were killed in his presence, his own eyes were put out; and, after the temple and palace had been burned and the city sacked, he, with all the families of the upper class who had not escaped to the desert, was carried away to Babylon (586 B.C.). Tyre (the old city) in like manner was taken by assault ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I don't believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... carefulness she has displayed all along, even had she not been so diligent and careful, she couldn't have been set aside! But what is provoking is that that lot, like Ch'ing Wen and Ch'i Hsia, should have been included in the upper class. Yet it's because every one places such reliance on the fine reputation of their father and mother that they exalt them. Now, do tell me, is this sufficient to anger ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... station platform, bevies of merry-faced, daintily dressed young women were engaged in the joyful occupation of greeting classmates who had arrived on the four o'clock train. Here and there, committees of upper class girls were extending friendly hands to timid freshmen just set down in the outskirts of ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... to time founded and endowed technical schools, designed for workingmen's sons. The early schools of this type inevitably reflected the ideal of the self-made man. They succeeded in transferring a few skilled workers into the upper class of trained engineers, and a few less skilled workers into the class of trained mechanics, but did not aim to educate the many who are doomed to the unskilled work which the permanent specialization of the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... in the general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable wrong, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... future which the more timid Tories professed to fear has already fallen upon us. We are ruled by ignorant people. But the most ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper class, the middle class, and especially the upper middle class. I do not say it with the smallest petulance or even distaste; these classes are often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality, or their humanity ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... Academy, whose belfry crowned The hill of Science with its vane of brass, Came the Preceptor, gazing idly round, Now at the clouds, and now at the green grass, And all absorbed in reveries profound Of fair Almira in the upper class, Who was, as in a sonnet he had said, As pure as water, and as good ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... true man's heart even now. With touching fidelity he pictured the sad life of the lower orders,—their thankless toil, their constant misery; then, with a sturdiness which awes us, he arraigned, first, royalty for its crushing taxation,—next, the whole upper class for its oppressions,—and then, daring death, he thus launched into popular thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the clergy of Oxford and the neighbourhood, save a circle of curule chairs reserved for the members of the Council. Into the midst of the excited crowd of clergy—among whom were sprinkled as many laymen, chiefly of the upper class, as could find room to squeeze in—filed an imposing procession of dignitaries—priests, archdeacons, bishops—all robed in full canonicals; the Bishop of the diocese being preceded by his crucifer. There ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... significant. He had no interest in the general sale, which was large enough to make his publisher's fortune. The publisher meanwhile supplied him gratuitously with the copies for which the subscribers paid him six guineas apiece. That means that he received a kind of commission from the upper class to execute the translation. The list of his subscribers seems to be almost a directory to the upper circle of the day; every person of quality has felt himself bound to promote so laudable an undertaking; the patron ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... state of Granada and its inhabitants; the common people were subject at any moment to be summoned to the field, and all the upper class was a brilliant chivalry. The Christian princes, so successful in regaining the rest of the Peninsula, found their triumphs checked at the mountain-boundaries of this kingdom. Every peak had its atalaya, or watch-tower, ready to make ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving |
