"Snobbery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Miss Eva——'. Here she gave audience to the 'buyers' and window-dressers, listened to complaints and excuses, and occasionally had a secret orgy of afternoon tea with one or two of her friends. None but these few girls—mostly younger than herself, and remarkable only in that their dislike of the snobbery of the Five Towns, though less fiercely displayed, agreed with her own—really knew Eva. To them alone did she unveil herself, and by them she ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... his tongue. His passion for high principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... inspired by the said events. I mean such writers as W.B. Yeats, Robert Bridges, Lord Alfred Douglas, W.H. Davies. And yet I see no reason why a Coronation, even in this day of figure-heads and revolting snobbery, should not be the subject of a good poem—a poem which would not be afflicting to read, either for the lettered public or for the chief actor in the scene. However, the time for such poems has apparently not yet arrived. And meanwhile the sea-and-slaughter school ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... this tempestuous period, whose only claim to recognition is that she waged petty persecution against the heroes of Canadian progress. Now the annals of the times do not record that this special sinner's wife and children so suffered. At all events Matthews' spirits were not cast down by social snobbery. He continued to sympathize with the agitators. The "family compact" bided their time, and their time came a few months later, when a company of American actors came to Toronto. A band concert had been given. When the British national air struck up, all hats were off. Then some one called ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... monopoly, of unequal laws, of industrial and commercial chicanery, of disgraceful ignorance, of economic fallacies, of public corruption, of interested legislation, of want of public spirit, of vulgar boasting and chauvinism, of snobbery, of class prejudice, of respect of persons, of a preference of the material over the spiritual. In a word, America has not attained, or nearly attained, perfection. But below and behind and beyond all its weaknesses and ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people were laughing ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... college degrees he may have acquired. Thinking is the hardest work any one can do—which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. 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. You cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year, but you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in former years, and ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... and her backbone just a little stiffer than that of the average colored person because of pride—family pride—in her people—her white people. And as one can readily see from her testimony, her chief cause for her pardonable snobbery seems to be that her Massa was the last man to surrender and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... original character is lost under a flood of new houses, trim streets and shops, which have grown to meet the requirements of a large but fluctuating population. Unduly to deplore this is, I suppose, a form of intellectual snobbery. Both Minehead and Ilfracombe are still undoubtedly beautiful in their setting of sea and moorland, the one upon lofty cliffs, the other among gently rounded and wooded hills; and it is fitting that more ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... We can see it in the witty and withering criticism delivered by the Yankee traveller in the musty refreshment room of Mugby Junction; a genuine example of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a genuinely British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody expects the American traveller to admire the refreshments at Mugby Junction; but he might admire the refreshment at one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the artistic or intellectual world—by those of the world of wealth and rank who were interested in such matters, and the yet larger number who affected to be interested in them. For those Anglo-Saxon deities, Mammon and Snobbery, who have since conquered the whole civilized globe, had temporarily fallen back for a fresh spring, and in the eighties and early nineties Culture was reckoned very nearly as chic as motoring in the first years of ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... counterparts enough, and though they may be traced to a class of society less notorious than that with which she moved, are generally kept in the dark chamber of hidden thoughts. We are indeed fast gaining an unenviable fame for snobbery, for affecting to be what we never can be, and for our sad imitation of foreign flunkydom, which, finding us rivals in the realm of its tinsil, begins to button up its coat and look contemptuously at us over the left shoulder. If, albeit, the result of that passion ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... warm heart withal, and infinite capacities for tenderness; selfish it may be, but inexorably just; cold to all the outside world, but warm-hearted and generous and magnificently loyal to his family, throughout all his distinguished career. No trace of snobbery or false shame in him. Not liking the reformers of his own day, but almost deifying the reformers of the past, and himself making it his mission, from earliest youth to hoary age, to reform the world in his own particular Carlylean way; fiercely assailing ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... guarantees a certain decency in life; but in intimate intercourse with people of other nations who have not this particular cult of suppression, we English disappoint, and jar, and often irritate. Nations have their differing forms of snobbery. At one time the English all wanted to be second cousins to the Earl of Leitrim, like that lady bland and passionate. Nowadays it is not so simple. The Earl of Leitrim has become etherealised. We no longer care how a fellow is born so long as he behaves ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... makes it seek the association of well-known names and shun all of those with an unfashionable reputation. To observe the way in which some people will introduce into their conversation, speeches, or writings, the names of well-known men, is a revelation of this mental snobbery. And the moral equivalent of this is the fear of being found in the company of an opinion that has been branded as immoral. Such people have all the fear of an unpopular opinion that a savage has of a ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... an invincible snobbery]. They dare not touch an English officer. I will go to the Empress myself: she cannot know who Captain Edstaston ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... the most thoroughbred human beings I have ever seen. No wonder the greatest snobs like her. There is nothing a snob hates so much as snobbery in another. Viva to your ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... contracted without extraneous aid. The first is their worship of wealth, their devout genuflection before it as the sole choicest gift which fate can bestow, and the second is their merciless and metallic snobbery. They have made a god of caste, and in a country where, of all other cults, that of caste is the most preposterous. The men (the real grown-up men, who may hate the big balls, but are nevertheless a great deal in the movement as regards other gay pastimes) watch them with quiet ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... exploration of American social, moral, and cultural issues. This said, it must be admitted that the telling of Adrienne's sad plight in Paris becomes a bit overwrought; and that the inept wooing of Mary Monson by the social cad Tom Thurston is so drawn out and sarcastic as to suggest snobbery on Cooper's part as well as on that of his elite hanky. Finally, the heroine-handkerchief's protracted failure to recognize her maker, when she has proved so sensitive to her surroundings in every other fashion, is simply unbelievable. ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now the ark that floats triumphant over the democratic wave; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... all, perhaps, it was a phase of snobbery to dislike being seen with him—something of that same feeling which she had never failed to ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... free development of talent, to obstruct the natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... happen to be?" Lorraine leant back against her cushions, with her slow, easy grace, asking the question with a lightness that robbed it of all pointedness or snobbery. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... the purpose of showing to these people of moderate salaries what could be done by cooperation. It is managed entirely by the members of the Department. There is no caste line or snobbery in the institution, and for the first time the people in the different bureaus are becoming acquainted with each other, and enjoy the opportunities of club life. The idea should be extended. We should have in the city of Washington a great service club, covering a block of land, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The puzzling and truncated monosyllable "Esq." is a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could well be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was above all things an incomplete and probationary position—the tadpole of knighthood; the second is above all things a complete and ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Ardens as families of consequence, and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father's ill luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... onto his portable, wireless mike, he babbled along about the wonderful people present tonight and the good time being had by all. The Exclusive Room being founded on pure snobbery, he made great todo about the celebrities present. This politician, that actress, this currently popular songstress, that baron ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... it savors of a life abroad to speak with horror of pie, although they were very likely the foremost of the Americans in Paris who used to speak with more enthusiasm of the American pie at Madame Busque's than of the Venus of Milo. To talk against pie and still eat it is snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things. To affect dislike of pie is something. We have no statistics on the subject, and cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in the country at large. Its disappearance in select ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of youthful Russian nobility for their respective places in the military, possibly the official, world. As it presently turned out, these great schools were destined to become hot-beds of tyranny, intrigue, rivalry, caste-feeling, and snobbery in their worst forms. Hence, considering the certain future of each cadet, the Corps afforded an even more adequate preparation for bureaucratic methods than their creator had had reason to expect. In the Moscow institution every inmate, from its head, Colonel Becker, to the youngest ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... that of the chambermaid or butler. The mere pride of an easy mastery over slaves is the taint of every society in which class differences are recognized as fixed. It attaches to all classes; whether it be called snobbery or obsequiousness, it is all one. The virtue of mastery, on the other hand, lies in the power and in the attainment which ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... young Keith at the wheel, the chauffeur beside him, grips in the tonneau. Donald Keith jumped out, affable, a little inclined to condescension at first toward everything connected with the ranch, including Kate Nicholson. The imperturbable driver left with the car. Young Keith's snobbery wore off as he inspected the corrals and the stock with eager interest and the riders with a certain measure of awe, which he transferred to Sandy on learning that he had broken two colts ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... There's just as much snobbery in sticking to mispronunciation as there is in being correct. And just as much affectation in talking with a burr as in dropping it. You think it's all right for me to dress as they do in New York. Why shouldn't I talk the same way? If it's all right ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... such as hats, boots, choker, gloves, are always carefully attended to; for it is in this department that so distinguished a member of the detective police as ourselves is always enabled to arrest disguised snobbery. You will never see a man of fashion affect a Paget hat, for example, or a D'Orsayan beaver: the former has a ridiculous exuberance of crown, the latter a by no means allowable latitude of brim—besides, borrowing the fashion of a hat, is with him what plagiarizing the interior ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... search of new adventures; in the case of another, who cherishes prejudices from birth, it is the longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of another, flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite can conceal all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery in quest of higher connections to swindling in quest of easier prey, submitting to the brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre intrigues of policy, or the sadness of a life which has been a failure. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... haste to abase himself. "It is mere snobbery our making so much of London. A kind ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... inimical to democracy than anarchy is snobbery. The former is violent, while the latter is insidious. Both poison the source of the stream of democracy. If the home instills into the minds of children the notion of inherent superiority, they will carry this into the school and it will produce ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... sectionalism, and bravado, with constant disappointment for the idealist who believes, traditionally, in the intelligence of the crowd. American social history is a glaring instance of how the theory of equal dignity for all men can entangle itself with caste distinctions, snobbery, and the power of wealth. American economic history betrays the pioneer helping to kick down the ladder which he himself had raised toward equal opportunity for all. American literary history—especially ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... too, then said apologetically: "It sounds the most fearful snobbery to even mention class distinctions in these wilds, where the only aristocracy that counts is nobility of endeavour. But I could not reckon myself that woman's superior, Father, because under the ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he, "remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine that it ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... none of the keen sensitiveness to minute social distinctions and to the social proprieties which mark them that is so striking a feature of the life in "democratic" England and to which we have given the name "snobbery." There are of course social strata in Russia, but they are broadly marked and there is no sense of competition between them. A peasant is not ashamed of being a peasant, and when he meets a nobleman he meets him on terms of spiritual equality while acknowledging his superior position in the social ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... brothers don't suit this democratic nation like a man who got acquainted with this country before ever he set eyes on it, through the boys he commanded out yonder. Great man! Fit to be Governor-General of a great country, and I won't deny it. No snobbery. Seventh son of an earl, all his life a soldier and a worker. A real man, such as any of us could present to our constituents with pleasure and pride. Tell ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... look upon it in that light, my lord. Our civilisation has passed beyond snobbery. Of course there was a time, centuries ago when we were taught that any physical contest was brutal. But that was before ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... European imitation. "Byron's characters," he says, "are not real people, but rather incarnations of the various moods of the poet," and he ends by saying that Byron is "great but monotonous." We find the same thing in Lermontov, who was fond of Byron, not only in a transient mood of snobbery, but because the very strong and sombre character of his imagination naturally led him to choose this kind of intense poetry. He was exerting himself to regard reality seriously and to reproduce it with exactitude, at the very time when he was killed in a duel at ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... regret of my life," announced Miss Kiametia, her eyes twinkling, "that I never kept a photograph of Mrs. Sunderland taken when she first came to Washington ten years ago. It would provide a study in expression and expansion in social snobbery." ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... must be some way—some punishment for his offence that could not strike her through him! It was wicked, it was contemptible, insane, to strike her! What were the governors of the Lenox about—a lot of snivelling hypocrites, pandering to the horrified snobbery at the Patroons! Who were they, anyway, to discipline him! Scarce one in fifty among the members of the two clubs was qualified to sit in judgment ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... club of a hobo whose nails were clean, whose address was elegant and who had confounded surgeons on surgery, artists on art, poets on verse and theologues on theology. He knew that the circles which had soothed his artistic snobbery with an admiration as grateful as soft fingers on a cat's back held no letters patent on charm or cultivation and yet his own mind had catalogued women of the stage, off-stage, under a general heading, in some way associated with cabaret ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... which this great Commonwealth has grown and prospered; big, broad-minded, strong men who, whatever their failings—for they were very human—were generous to a fault, ever ready to listen to the cry of distress or help a fallen brother to his feet, scornful of pettiness, ignorant of snobbery, fair and square in their dealings with their fellows. Alas, that it should have come to "Hail and Farewell" to ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... replace all the other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization of childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions for children is ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... that he, the agricultural labourer's son and apprentice to a village carpenter, was the possessor both of a Broadway Grand and of a daughter who, entirely through his efforts, had learned to play on it. Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... is just twice as bad as the snobbery in Boston or New York, because back there, the families have had their wealth long enough—some of 'em got it by stealing real estate in 1820, and some by selling Jamaica rum and niggers way back before the Revolutionary ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... Burgoyne. "Have you formed any conception of the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?" Excellent, too, is the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England, snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... strenuously object to the application to ourselves of the theory of evolution? One or two reasons are easily seen. We have all of us a great deal of innate snobbery, we would rather have been born great than to have won greatness by the most heroic struggle. But is man any less a man for having arisen from something lower, and being in a fair way to become something higher? Certainly not, unless ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the fundamental tenets of Biblical Christianity. Such a movement does not produce that intellectual humility which belongs to the Christian mind. On the contrary, it is responsible for a vast amount of intellectual pride, an aristocracy of intellect with all the snobbery which usually accompanies that term. Do they not exactly correspond to Paul's word, 'vainly puffed up in his fleshly mind and not holding fast the head, etc.' They have a splendid scorn for all opinions which do not agree with theirs. Under the spell of this sublime ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan |
