Quotes & Sayings About Snobbery

As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything. — Rachel Cusk

Snobbery has gone out of fashion, and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dress. — Mary Quant

I stay subjective because that's what I do. That's one of my abilities. I don't need to watch it because I've had the adventure. I don't do low-budget acting. I do the same acting, whether I'm in a Jim Cameron or not. I always try to do good work. There's no snobbery in there — Lance Henriksen

Ah, beware of snobbery; it is the unwelcome recognition of one's own past failings. — Cary Grant

Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive towards colorlessness? But seriously and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. — Ralph Ellison

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonisation, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon), the victimisation of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. — Matt Haig

The bus was crowded, standing room only, and he clung apelike from a bar that hung down from the ceiling. It was humiliating to be packed in with all these people; it reminded him of a cattle car or worse, a sardine can, or worse...but what could be worse than this? — Joseph G. Peterson

Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit's mind? One has the feeling that the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish has reading any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be when Island it as a young person. — Robert Lane Greene

It was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. 'Because you are not cute, I do not want to know you' was, to me, hardly different from suggesting 'because you are gay, I dislike you — Stephen Fry

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. — Christopher Hitchens

The British are actually a lot more appreciative of the comic. In Canada, if you're perceived as a comic writer, there's a real snobbery, and you can't be serious. You're not a big hitter. — Miriam Toews

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English 'education' fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school - I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet - but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave. — George Orwell

A stickler hallmark is that those who speak or write differently can't merely be wrong; they must be depraved, too. — Robert Lane Greene

I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss "the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,"6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding "political correctness" becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don't like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words — Joan C. Williams

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair. — Joseph Brodsky

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery. — Louis MacNeice

Mmm, being irresistibly likeable is such a trial,' she drawled in an impeccable aristocratic whine. 'One is constantly in demand, but one must do one's duty, mustn't one, dear chap? Noblesse oblige and all that ... — Susan Napier

Snobbery is one of the things one should be most discriminating about — Edward St. Aubyn

The worst form of snobbery is to deny information; to anyone at all. Always remember that. Bas as it is to look down on another human being: to act as censor? Unforgivable. — Matthew Blakstad

A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso. — A.P. Herbert

It's the Queen's English now,' observed Peter mildly.

'Is there a difference?' asked Oundle rhetorically. 'I fervently hope not.'

'There will be in time,' said Peter.

'That will be deplorable,' replied Oudle. 'I shall not myself deviate by a syllable from correct usage.'

'My language is foul, and yours is Fowler?' said Peter, and added one of his sudden quirky smiles, 'or know your Onions.'

This quip crossed the barrier of the table, because the man sitting nearly opposite Peter laughed.

'Onions?' said Oudle.

'C.T. Onions, I imagine,' said the man opposite. 'Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.'

'Oh, I see,' said Oudle. 'Very droll. — Jill Paton Walsh

A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot. — George Orwell

Questions, Hypothetical: Needn't be answered. No one knows why.
Schools, Public: They teach you to stand on your own two feet. 'No doors on the lavatories. That sorts the men from the boys'.
Snobbery, Inverted: The worst kind. No need to explain why. — William Donaldson

The shabbier the snobbier. — Elaine Dundy

I don't believe in any kind of artistic snobbery or musical snobbery. You know, to me, the sexiest and the most spiritual words ever uttered in rock and roll are wop babaloo balop bam boom. — Sinead O'Connor

Class amusements, be they for Dukes or plow-boys, always become nuisances and curses to a country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still, more or less sociable and universal; There's a place for every man who will come and take his part. — Thomas Hughes

Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen. — Kealan Patrick Burke

If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable. — Criss Jami

My snobbery made me do it. — John Lithgow

Snobbery is the pride of those who are not sure of their position. — Berton Braley

People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored. — Alain De Botton

The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won't find it because it is beneath them. — D.E. Navarro

Soaps are great. You learn to work very fast - some say superficially, but that's not really true. You do some very serious character work. I've never had any feelings about a stigma attached to it, and nowadays there seems to be less snobbery about what you do. More and more big names are doing TV and commercials and voiceovers. — Charles Shaughnessy

Snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things. — Charles Dudley Warner

Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce. — Christopher Hitchens

I don't know'," he said. "Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage." And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer.
I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author's craftsmanship. — John William Tuohy

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility ... youth's characteristic chronological snobbery. — C.S. Lewis

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. — C.S. Lewis

In the snobbery of science, each branch attempts to rise in the social scale by imitating the methods of the next higher science and by ignoring the methods and phenomena of the sciences beneath. — Gilbert Newton Lewis

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery. — Alain De Botton

[General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary. — Russell S. Bonds

Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that noblemen and commoners appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level. — Marcel Proust

Although the rudiments of snobbery are there, its finer developments are basically alien to the Australian soul - that is, if Australians have a soul; many people believe that they are too matter-of-fact and down-to-earth to have such fancy commodities. — George Mikes

There is a middlebrow snobbery in America that praises everything on public television and disdains everything on the commercial networks as a blight. — Henry Fairlie

The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil's last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God. — Arthur Miller

There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. — Henry Ford

As royalty, celebrities and the rich have always known, a smile is the most subtle and satisfying way of shitting on the inferior. — Michael Foley

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them. — Joseph Epstein

A second or two later, the reptile had been quite absorbed by a handsome, arrogant-looking Englishman smelling strongly of snobbery and snake. — P.B. Kerr

The word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth — Alain De Botton

You are perfectly right in objecting to them [modern art], for this one great fault - that they have not yet had time to become old. — Alexandre Dumas

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music. — Stephen Fry

Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism. — Alex Kapranos

Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescapable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is our fellow creatures' lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man. And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth's happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man's attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational, or wicked. — Matthew Scully

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men. — Helen Keller

My stepmother appeared when I was about 9. My brother was sent off to an institute in Scotland & my sister & I were sent to school. As my stepmother's ideas were then wholly Quaker, mixed with a naive & charming innocence & a little snobbery, it was one dotty epoch on top of another. I always remained terrified of my father. — Louis MacNeice

But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is a class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means. — Owen Jones

It can be so difficult to train up the peasants," she said, pretending to commiserate, her voice heavy with irony. "They find it so hard to project the kind of snobbery that comes so naturally to their betters. — Caitlin Crews

At least when it comes to food, there's no snobbery in Singapore. — Kevin Kwan

A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa. — E. Norman Torry

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level. — Irvine Welsh

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money. — Albert Camus

Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors.... — Charlotte MacLeod

It is professional snobbery that refrains training rookies. — Aniruddha Sastikar

Why do you like Hugh better? Because he is a Viscount?'
'Well, that's one reason,' I admitted, without any false shame. Respect for degree was in my blood and I didn't think of it as snobbery. — L.P. Hartley

I have been to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street but cannot get on the BBC. I am very disappointed because it boils down to snobbery. — Phil Taylor

In the field of snobbery, Australia is an underdeveloped country; even a few British ex-colonies, regarded as under developed in all other respects, could export a great deal of snobbery to Australia and still have enough to spare for their own, internal needs. — George Mikes

All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another. — Donna Tartt

The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility's dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity. — Tom Holland

We had enough quite enough snobbery in this world without exporting it to the hereafter. — Rick Riordan

Manchester has everything but good looks ... , the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery. — A.J.P. Taylor

The derision comes from snobbery, which I think is the worst thing for art and music. I don't think there's any place for it and it comes from insecurity. — Theo Hutchcraft

The Occidental snobbery which is invading us, the gunboats, rapid-fire guns, long-range rifles, explosives ... what else? Everything which makes death collective, administrative and bureaucratic - all the filth of your progress, in fact - is destroying, little by little, our beautiful traditions of the past. — Octave Mirbeau

Don't get me wrong - intellectual snobbery is vulgar and gauche. — Robert Webb

The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man. — Roger Scruton

Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher's deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher's basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan [Forster] and the others . . . [t]hus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein. — Christopher Isherwood

Some people have such good taste they can't enjoy anything. — Marty Rubin

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines. — Timothy Noah

...and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery. — Steven Moore

Instead, the new snobbery is based on being 'knowing', and in displaying an awareness of the codes which are used to classify and differentiate between classes. It distinguishes those who are skilled in exercising judgement, in a knowing and sophisticated way, against those, whoever they may be, who are deemed unable to choose effectively. — Mike Savage

Today they are teaching the subject of art as a frill in school, partly due to intellectual preciousness that has crept into art departments with the making of the History of Art. Intellectualising places art on a pedestal only for the few, causing New Zealanders to revert to the invented snobbery that tends to ignore anything arty as exotic, unattainable, not wholesome. — Theresa Sjoquist

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There's no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another. — Dorothy Salisbury Davis

[T]he new weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction's claim to literary 'seriousness.' This desire for seriousness is not snobbery, as sometimes suggested by folks who overemphasize the entertainment function of speculative fiction; it's about recognition of the vast possibilities within the field. — Darja Malcolm-Clarke

This is the snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT! — Mitchell Kapor

I deeply detest social distinction and snobbery, and in that lies my strong aversion to titular honours. — Helen Clark

Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will. — Alister E. McGrath

Because I don't think I have a handle on how to write for grown-ups. The grown-up publishing world is so fraught with one-upsmanship, scorn and snobbery. I did write an adult novel. Thank goodness it went out of print. I think we kids' authors still start out with hope every morning. We honor our audience. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

No one knew much about the Twenty-Eighth Infantry. It was not a glamour outfit.
They knew about the Big Red One and the Screaming Eagles, about the Eighty-Second Airborne and Hell On Wheels, but not about Twenty-Eighth Infantry. The name was met with a certain silence, as if he was in a room full of Harvard graduates and told them his degree was by correspondence. — Miles Watson

He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but always what he could do. — Ernest Hemingway,

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff — Leonard Bernstein

We are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer 'striking' and 'smiting'; talk and chat and prefer 'speech' and 'discourse'; well-bred, brilliant, or polite noblemen (visions of snobbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the 'worthy, brave and courteous men' of long ago. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing. — Robert Lane Greene

Racism is the snobbery of the poor. — Raymond Aron

I always tell the fans, 'Screw it! Like what you like. Listen to what you want.' Insisting that one type of music is better than the next is snobbery, and I have no time for that. Check out all the music that's out there. There's great stuff you're probably missing. — Corey Taylor

Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky's unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky's view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are, therefore, not about 'real life,' which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action-adventure, unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes, and they are, therefore, not solid. — Margaret Atwood

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. — Dan Rather

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. — George Orwell

If a community bends over backward to be publicly liberal, it can give itself the bonus of private snobbery. — Penelope Ashe