"Upper class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and 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 nothing ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... season, with most of her acquaintances married off, and enjoying and flaunting 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 ears ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... exist, the greatest being that the war has made men turn to 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 was by no means ready ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... 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
... description of the upper class marriage feast, but that of the poorer class is carried on in much the same style, except that the proceedings are much briefer. The bride's father and people on the one hand strive by might and main to get the highest payment obtainable, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... vote, when the sloping-shouldered, sloping-skulled youths who proposed to marry them, or had married them, had that right and did not exercise it and showed no information and no concern as to the rottenness of the local government.... The upper class of women are enlisted. Woman suffrage is the one interesting subject of discussion ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... and regimented her people like an ant-hill or a beehive. The people themselves, including many who belong to the upper class, are often simple villagers in temper, full of kindness and anger, much subject to envy and jealousy, not magnanimous, docile and obedient to a fault. If they claimed, as individuals, to represent the highest reach of European civilization, the claim ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... husband and very little else remains that she wrote. From the few letters that do survive it is apparent that her education was slender, though no more so than that of most women of her day even in the upper class. She had a fondness for phonetic spelling, and her verbs and subjects often indulged in family wrangles. She seems to have been conscious of her deficiencies in this direction or at least to have disliked writing, for not infrequently the General acted as her amanuensis. But she ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... Our friends at once replied that we would thankfully accept his offer, and all arrangements were quickly made. We were glad to obtain so intelligent a companion. His kind and gentle manner at once gained our confidence, and though his dress and appearance were those of ordinary Indians of the upper class, he looked like one accustomed to receive the respect of his fellow-men. That he was no common person we were sure. Why he took the interest in us which he evinced we could not tell. John and I talked the matter over, and at length, recollecting that our father's mother was of Indian descent, ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 soldiery, and the formal submission of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the surface of society, London wears its most radiant smile; when shops are gayest, and trade most brisk; when down the thoroughfares roll and glitter the countless streams of indolent and voluptuous life; when the upper class spend, and the middle class make; when the ball-room is the Market of Beauty, and the club-house the School for Scandal; when the hells yawn for their prey, and opera-singers and fiddlers—creatures ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be regarded as one of a series of books, variations on the same theme, composed by the same author. The first was "The New Ghetto" (1894). That was a play which dealt with the social life of the upper class of Jews in Vienna. Then came the "Address to the Rothschilds." That was a memorandum which contained a proposal to Jewish philanthropists. "The Jewish State" was the third effort of an agitated mind, wavering ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common rogue and 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 happiness, content with his acquired ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... suppresses dissensions, seem to be the life of popular governments. Aristotle had noticed this. The oppression of wealth submitted to agrarian laws, or to excessive taxation; the hatred of the lower classes for the upper class, which is exposed always to libellous charges made in hopes of confiscation,—these were the features of the Athenian government which were especially revolting to Aristotle, and which caused him to favor a limited monarchy. Aristotle, if he had lived in our day, would have ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... difficult to see how that upper class to which our legislators of both Houses of Parliament mainly belong, should differ greatly from the larger and more solid portion of the middle classes in almost all questions of a religious character and bearing. Bacon, in his Essay on Kings, has quaintly, but, we are afraid, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... satisfactory; they were quite respectable, bourgeois, silk merchants in a small way—although at least two strata below that haute bourgeoisie which now regarded itself as the real upper class of the Republique Francaise. A true Ruyler, however, would have fled at the first danger signal, never have reached the point where inquiries were ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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, only entered the Italian ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... were related at all or if we call her so from mere courtesy. If she be related to us, it is so distant that I cannot explain it. I fancy we call her so without any blood ties at all. You know how it is with a family like ours—in fact all English families of the upper class. We've lived in one place for generations, and always have played the Lady Bountiful to the poorer folk until they grow to believe they have a claim upon us. Betty Rice is not the only one of these ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... in cards on a tray" (from Joe Wilson's Courtship): An upper class house, with servants who would take a visitor's card (on a tray) to announce their presence, or, if the family was out, to keep a record of ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... and patrician class, who had practically been supreme in the state, had been oppressive money-lenders, and had controlled the decisions of the law courts. It was not in vain that the people now demanded that as the two consuls were practically elected to further the interests of the upper class, so they, the plebeians, should have the election of two tribunes to protect them from wrong and oppression. These new officers were duly appointed, and eventually their number was increased to ten. Their power was almost absolute, but it never seems ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... group of men, whose dress belonged to the upper class, moved down through the street ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... formed a considerable portion of the population. The class next above them comprised the large body of free men, who were possessed of a certain amount of property but were poor and humble, as their name, muslikenu, implied. These we may refer to as the middle class. The highest, or upper class, in the Babylonian community embraced all the officers and ministers attached to the court, the higher officials and servants of the state, and the owners of considerable lands and estates. The differences which divided and marked off from one another the two great ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... of lectures, and have an examination in the theory and practice of education. It is the only examination in the theory and practice of education for men engaged in middle and upper class teaching in this country. Except the Teacher's Diploma. And so few come—not two hundred a year. Mostly governesses. The men prefer to teach by rule of thumb, you know. English characteristic—rule of thumb. It doesn't do to say anything of course—but there's bound to be—something ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... made, sir, by each man himself. Just look at what society is. We are all parvenus. My father was a cloth merchant—in a wholesale way, certainly—and yet you see—now this is equality, sir, the real and the right kind of equality. There is no such thing as caste now. The upper class springs from the people, and the people rise to the upper class. I could have found a count for my daughter, if I had wanted to. But it is just simply a case of evil instincts, evil passions, and these communist ideas—it is all this which is against wealth. We hear ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... killing time, fashion is among the last influences under which a human being, who respects himself or who comprehends the great end of life, would desire to be placed. I use strong language, because I would combat the disposition, too common in the laboring mass, to regard what is called the upper class with envy or admiration. This disposition manifests itself among them in various forms. Thus, when one of their number prospers he is apt to forget his old acquaintance, and to work his way, if possible, into a more fashionable caste. As far, indeed, as he extends his acquaintance among the intelligent, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... awaiting their hour of service. Beggars are plenty, but few persons were seen really intoxicated, notwithstanding that pulque is cheap and muscal very potent. Red, blue, brown, and striped rebosas flitted before the eyes, worn by the restless crowd, while occasionally one saw a lady of the upper class, attended by her maid in gaudy colors, herself clad in the dark, conventional Spanish style, her black hair, covered with a lace veil of the same hue, held in place ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... (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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of people are the upper class?" said the man in black, putting a lump of sugar into his ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... that the Elizabethan audiences were rather an unruly congregation. There was much cracking of nuts and consuming of pippins in the old playhouses; ale and wine were on sale, and tobacco was freely smoked by the upper class of spectators, for it was hardly yet common to all conditions. Previous to the performance, and during its pauses, the visitors read pamphlets or copies of plays bought at the playhouse-doors, and, as they drank and smoked, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... English upper class," said Darrell, with a sneer. "Is there anything they take lightly?—par exemple! It seems to me they carry off this amusement better than most. They may be stupid, but they are good-looking. I say, Ashe"—he turned towards ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of ridicule, on account of the hat and cane, walk, and so on, though I thought I'd got over that by this time. The Opera House was partly filled with college men, a large number of sophomores and a few upper class men. It was pretty generally known I was going to have a row, and that brought them as much as the show. Poor Ruff was in agony all day. He supposed I'd get into the fight, and he knew he'd get in, too, sooner or later. If he did he'd be held and not be able to do anything, ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... small literary world of his own. Tibullus published in his lifetime two books of elegiac poems; after his death a third volume was published, containing a few of his posthumous pieces, together with poems by other members of the same circle. Of these, six are elegies by a young poet of the upper class, writing under the name of Lygdamus, and plausibly conjectured to have been a near relative of Tibullus. One, a panegyric on Messalla, by an unknown author, is without any poetical merit, and only interesting as an average specimen of the amateur verse of the time ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... showed us to a little table in the back part of the room, where we could have a good view of all the tables. Our table was large enough to seat four comfortably, and presently, as the room became crowded, the proprietor, with many excuses, asked if he could seat two gentlemen with us. They were upper class Italians, exceedingly polite, and apologized profusely for intruding upon us. In a few minutes another gentleman entered and our companions at once began frantic gesticulations and called him to our table, where room was made and another cover laid. Again and ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... crisis. The poor people welcome to their homes soldiers who in most cases belong to the same strata of society as themselves; and, besides, ninepence a night as billet-fee is not to be laughed at. The upper class can easily bear the momentary inconvenience of Tommy's company; the method of procedure of the very rich in regard to billeting seldom varies—a room, stripped of all its furniture, fitted with beds and pictures, ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... 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 ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... chiefly to orations, odes, and such single speeches of plays, as are in the declamatory and vehement style. But as there are many scenes of plays, which are justly reckoned among the finest compositions of the language, some of these may be adopted among the upper class of boys, and those more particularly who have the best deportment: for action in scenes will be found much more difficult than in single speeches. And here it will be necessary to give some additional instructions respecting action, as ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... 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 miseries of war because ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... found, at its face value, 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, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... 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, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... carved on the stone pillars of her great wrought-iron gates, to remind the populace that, while her late father-in-law, "Buck" Dorsey, was the plainest of butchers and meat packers, his ancestry was of the proudest. With the rise of its "upper class" Saint X had gone in diligently for genealogy, had developed reverence for "tradition" and "blood," had established a Society of Family Histories, a chapter of the Colonial Dames, another of Daughters ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... influences in America were not mainly to be 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 ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... their husbands, brothers, or fathers, only for having been seen by men, and even to the present day a husband would be considered quite justified in the eye of the law if he were to kill his wife for the great sin of having spoken to another man but himself! A widow of the upper class is not allowed to re-marry, and if she claims any pretence of having loved her late husband, she ought to try to follow him to the other world at the earliest convenience by committing the jamun, a simple performance by which the devoted wife is only expected ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... circle of work that was necessarily underpaid because it was inefficient, and work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves at top equal to the needs of that joint hazard. Penury was only at two removes from the "gentry houses." While the first line of defence, the tenants, held ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... caste which rules, largely Prussian, militaristic, and bureaucratic; and that which, although desirous of more republican institutions and potentially capable of liberal views, is constrained to obey the first or ruling class. This upper class is not friendly to the modern women's-rights movement. Perhaps it has read too much Schopenhauer. This amiable philosopher, whose own mother could not endure living with him, has this to ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... Co. shall no longer be freshman at Gridley H.S.! If the spirit seizes any of 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 against ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... upper class roasting must also have come into use at an early period. "Give flesh to roast for the priest; for he will not take sodden flesh of thee, but raw," says the servant of the sons of Eli in 1Samuel ii. 15. The fact that ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... of perfect preservation. Our local clergyman receives a stipend which is too paltry to bear comparison with the wages of an ordinary mechanic. In dress, manners, and tastes he is about on a level with the upper class of agricultural laborer. When attempts have been made by well-meaning gentlefolks to recognize the claims of his profession by asking him to their houses, he has been known, on more than one occasion, to leave his plowman's pair of shoes ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... is not the be-all and end-all of their pursuits. In our democratic Commonwealth, although there are some lower titles bestowed by the Sovereign on colonists more or less distinguished, these are not hereditary, so that an aristocracy is not hereditary. There may be an upper class, based on landed estate or one on business success, or one on learning, but all tend to become conservative as conservatism is understood in Australia. Safety is maintained by the free rise from the lower to the higher. But all the openings to higher education offered in high school ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... as he thought of her, for, in spite of his greed and his slyness, Sir Juden was an affectionate father, as fathers went in those days, and the lot of unmarried ladies of the upper class, at that time, was a ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... has led to a considerable change in the diet of a very large proportion—the poorer part—of the community. Whilst the families of the better-paid working class and all the middle and upper class continue to eat meat, the agricultural labourer and the poorer workmen in towns live chiefly on flour, sugar, bacon, and cheese. Probably they have become habituated to this diet, and, provided that the quantity is sufficient, it cannot be maintained that the diet, in which meat is nearly ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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 enigma, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... human side he is related to earth. And the first men he drew to his side were shepherds, representatives of the common people. He did not come as a member of any special class, especially of the upper class. No one can ever save the world by winning over the rich and the great. Society cannot be lifted from the top. Whoever would raise the level of society must get his lever under its foundation stones. Taking hold of the carved cornice will tear the roof off and lift it away from the building, ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... 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 Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... English gentleman. It was their camp-fire which I had seen on the hill 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 preservation and development of the language spoken by the bulk of the population. He maintained that the West-European civilisation, that had been imparted to the Finnish nation, would never take firm root if only supported by a small upper class—it ought to become the property of the whole people. An educated, Finnish-speaking class must be created, and to this end schools established in which the pupils could receive their instruction in Finnish. The Finnish language must be introduced ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Fleur as self-possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the likeliest Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present? If anything, the Forsytes had it in dress and looks and manners. They had become "upper class" and now their name would be formally recorded in the Stud Book, their money joined to land. Whether this was a little late in the day, and those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money, destined for the melting-pot—was still a question so moot that it was not mooted. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... 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 leader ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... divisions of 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... between France and Scotland had always been close, and French was a language familiar to most of the upper class; and since the civil troubles began, such numbers of Scottish gentlemen were forced either to shelter in France, or to take service in the French or other foreign armies, that a knowledge of the language became almost a matter ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... Greek nation, gifted with political genius but doomed to political decay—a nation whose sons accumulated money, lived in luxury with little forethought for the future, and refused to beget children for the State: a nation with a wealthy and cultured upper class, but one that was literally perishing for the lack of men.[310] Was this the fate in store for Rome? A temperament that was merely vigorous and keen might not have been affected by such reflections. One that was merely contemplative might have regarded ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... utility 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 ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... as elsewhere, their practical sense left open the way of promotion to its highest honors to the more humbly born; and every age saw admirals who had sprung from the lowest of the people. In this the temper of the English upper class differed markedly from that of the French. As late as 1789, at the outbreak of the Revolution, the French Navy List still bore the name of an official whose duty was to verify the proofs of noble birth on the part of those intending to ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... people would have somehow known that it was all right. He was not a snob, though he knew only half his class. His friends ranged from the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to "cultivate" him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... an air half cavalier, half poet, bringing to mind the chivalrous, graceful, fastidious bard, accomplished scholar, and courtier of his time, the devout believer in the divine right of kings, and of the immunities and privileges of the upper class generally. This Drummond, it seems, was early engaged to a fair young lady, whose death rendered his beautiful retreat of Hawthornden insupportable to him, and of course, like other persons of romance, he sought refuge in foreign travel, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... 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
... half a dozen years before "Clarissa Harlowe" was given to the public. Richardson had begun by taking a heroine out of low life; he now drew one from genteel middle class life; as he was in "Sir Charles Grandison," the third and last of his fictions, to depict a hero in the upper class life of England. In Clarissa again, plot was secondary, analysis, sentiment, the exhibition of the female heart under stress of sorrow, this was everything. Clarissa's hand is sought by an unattractive suitor; she rebels—a social crime in the eighteenth ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... manifested by the mishandling of children is so frequent a motif, we shall find quite a number of experiences of actual life which compel us to admit the frequency of such perverse sensibilities in women. Among various records bearing upon this matter, I may remind readers of those of the upper class women of ancient Rome, and of the horrible punishments they inflicted upon their female slaves; and also of American women of the slave-owning class, in the South before the war, who sometimes flogged young male slaves ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... insisted that there should be no unlawful tyranny. Where a regal government existed, kings should be subject to the laws, and act only as the chief magistrates. They regarded a {68} mixed constitution as the best, and where the administration rested principally in the hands of the upper class, they reserved a share of it for the people. The writings of the Pythagoreans commanded high prices, but gained political importance only so far as they contributed to the education of distinguished men, of whom ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... 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. The poor, indeed, the ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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. We get good people to restrain bad laws. And ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... has a great reputation in Moscow for its cuisine, and is the favourite restaurant and resort of the upper class; it has an imposing general luncheon and dining-hall, also separate saloons for private dinner-parties. Most of the official banquets are ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... fire stations, without encountering insult in the form of galanteria; and the electric street-car line, suspected at first, has gained the confidence of nearly all. Many Filipino families of the upper class permit their daughters to go to and from the American schools on the trolley car, and it is no uncommon thing to see three or four youngsters, all under ten, climbing on and off with their books, asking for transfers, and ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... 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 it ever ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is no upper class in a shop. But you said something about some drawings. Have you ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... authors you choose, but make me one concession: don't hold forth in my presence on either of two subjects: the corruption of the upper classes and the evils of the marriage system. Do understand me, at last. The upper class is always abused in contrast with the world of tradesmen, priests, workmen and peasants, Sidors and Nikitas of all sorts. I detest both classes, but if I had honestly to choose between the two, I should ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Asako. But was she really the same Asako? Geoffrey had often seen upper class Japanese ladies at receptions in the hotel at Tokyo. He had thought how picturesque they were, how well mannered, how excellent their taste in dress. But they had seemed to him quite unreal, denizens of a shadow ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... ranks do the 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. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... vulgar feeling or other. All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior" and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so much the worse for you when the working class came to its own; ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mighty coarse breed. I've lived out with gentle folks over the water, and they were none of your sort. But, go on John Burrill, the low women you are so fond of, and the girls at the factory, have called you good lookin', until your head is turned with vanity. You have got yourself in among the upper class, no matter how, and I suppose you expect your good looks to do the rest for you. I mind once when I was at service in Herefordshire, the Squire had a fine young beast in his cattle yard, black an' sleek, an' handsome ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the matter of chastity, on which the Union touched. We grant at the outset that wherever you have classes, the women of the lower class suffer more or less from the men of the upper class, and anybody who says that seductions, accomplished through the effect on female vanity of the addresses of "superiors in station," while almost unknown here, are very numerous in Europe, would find plenty of facts to support him. But, on ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... 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 for their children. The movement came from higher ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... read is not 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 its educating influence, had ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... There is in America a certain anarchy in questions of taste and manners which the long possession of a leisured, a cultivated class tends to save us from in England. I never felt so kindly a feeling towards our so-called "upper class" as when travelling in the United States and noting some effects of its absence. This class has an accepted position in the social hierarchy; its dicta are taken as authoritative on points of etiquette, just as the clergy are looked on as the official guardians of religious and ecclesiastical ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... provide for his old age. It is simply a question of the adjustment of values. This experiment has been tried before by different countries, but it was always tried in the interest of the employers; the laborers had no voice in the matter; and it was the interest of the upper class to cheapen labor; and hence Muscle became a drug and Cunning invaluable and masterful; and the process was continued indefinitely until the catastrophe came. Now labor has its own branch of our Congress, and can defend its rights ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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 destruction." For politically ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... manufacturers of a practical type, who have from time 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 ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... seek his death? Whose fingers 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 ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... alliance, therefore, was indicated and natural. But the extinction of privilege, which for monarchy and democracy alike meant fiscal equality, meant for the democracy a great deal more. Besides the money which they were required to pay in behalf of the upper class and for their benefit and solace, money had to be paid to them. Apart from rent for house or land, there were payments due to them proceeding from the time, the obscure and distant time, when power went ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... comfort during the Captivity; but the end of v. 4 shews that Joacim's estate was pre-eminent, not a sample of the general condition of the exiles. If not royal (as Jul. Afric. in his letter to Origen hints, and Origen doubts in his reply, ยง 14), it was evidently of an upper class; and a kind of tribunal was held at his house. The state of life here depicted agrees with Jeremiah's advice in xxix. 5; and with II. Esd. iii. 2, if that too could be applied ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... And pacific Russia—the heart and soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only real traitor to this saving morality of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... selfish, heartless, God-forgetting aristocracy? How can He do otherwise than deliver up the city? God has not changed, and though His mills grind slowly, they do grind still; and it is as true for England and America, as it was for Samaria, that a wealthy and leisurely upper class, which cares only for material luxury glossed over by art, which has condescended to be its servant, is bringing near the evil day which it hugs itself into believing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of old students chatting gayly, oblivious of the purpose of the affair. Oh, but the reception committee! Save for these indefatigable martyrs, the Freshman sexes might have gazed wistfully at each other across the lines of upper class-men until the lights dipped and never been able to bow on the Quad next day. Important-looking persons with silk badges and worried faces circulated in a grim endeavor to "mix things up." One of these wild-eyed people would dash into the crowd and haul some struggling upper class-man over to the ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... 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 served for writing and reading lessons, and Miss Payne was careful to ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... then, was 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 hands. The immediate occasion of his ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... 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 was a ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Grammar, so my father fondly and devotedly taught me my Scott, my Pope, and my Byron.[95] The Latin grammar out of which my mother taught me was the 11th edition of Alexander Adam's—(Edinb.: Bell and Bradfute, 1823)—namely, that Alexander Adam, Rector of Edinburgh High School, into whose upper class Scott passed in October 1782, and who—previous masters having found nothing noticeable in the heavy-looking lad—did find sterling qualities in him, and "would constantly refer to him for dates, and particulars of battles, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... brains up there and refinement—such women to get married to, such homes to settle down in. Sometimes I wish every promising radical kid in the country could get himself into some scandal that would cut him off for life from any chance of being received by this damned respectable upper class!" ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... amazingly 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
... upper class who had incited the people to resistance, Neithotep, the high-priest of Neith, had taken the foremost place. He was therefore sent to Memphis and put in close confinement, with one hundred of his unhappy confederates. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... description of people are the upper class?' said the man in black, putting a lump of sugar into his gin ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... sometimes of extraordinary shape, swords, leather gauntlets, Wellington boots, and other distinguishing gaudy insignia. The Corps are more or less select, the most exclusive of all being the Corps Borussia, which at every university only admits members of an upper class of society, though on rare occasions receiving in its ranks an exceptionally aristocratic, popular, or wealthy foreigner. To this Corps, the name of which is the old form of "Prussia," the Emperor belonged when at Bonn, and in one or two ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... all civilized nations of today—barring, of course, our own—we can see them side by side. Each conditions the other; neither would exist without the other. Each class develops its own moral and spiritual habits, its own set of virtues and vices. Some of us were born in the upper class, some in the lower; and in college groups the majority come from the border line. By instinct, by the experiences of life, or by national reflection, we usually give our moral allegiance to one or the other, and are then apt to lean to that side in ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch |
