"Snobbery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by means of which this great Commonwealth has grown and prospered; big, broad-minded, strong men who, whatever their failings—for they were very human—were generous to a fault, ever ready to listen to the cry of distress or help a fallen brother to his feet, scornful of pettiness, ignorant of snobbery, fair and square in their dealings with their fellows. Alas, that it should have come to "Hail and Farewell" to such a ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... 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 assured position—the status of the ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... ten Siamese lads and a little girl came to my room. The former were the half-brothers, nephews, and other "encumbrances" of the Kralahome; the latter their sister, a simple child of nine or ten. Surely it was with no snobbery of condescension that I received these poor children, but rather gratefully, as a comfort ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... wealth of tenderness, sympathy, and kindliness existed! His affection for his graceless nephew Karl is a touching picture. With the rest of his family he had never been on very cordial terms. His feeling of contempt for snobbery and pretense is very happily illustrated in his relations with his brother Johann. The latter had acquired property, and he sent Ludwig his card, inscribed "Johann van Beethoven, land-owner." The caustic reply was a card, on which was written, "Ludwig van Beethoven, brain-owner." ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... of a good, either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences. For the moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they express more directly and boldly the instinctive ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... 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 on ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... go to blazes; and when it's a question of Sam doing something similar, I retire hastily across the river and establish a residence in Missouri. What a rotten, custom-ridden bunch of snippy-snappy-snobbery we are after all!... All the same—who ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... ever; and this other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that stiffened smile, the undue gravity of his tone in uttering those few words, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had instantaneously been stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of snobbery: ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to try very hard to live as she ought to live, without pretensions or snobbery, but in a style becoming, in some degree, her ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to—the phrase ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... likewise they had all the trappings of snobbery—Montague took that fact in at a glance. There were knee-breeches and scarlet facings and gold braid—marble balconies and fireplaces and fountains—French masters and real Flemish tapestry. The staircase of their palace was a winding one, and there was a white ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... of magnificent distances, though it is gradually filling in the blanks, and is looked forward to as the coming city of the leisure and pleasure classes, who shall live unpolluted by the rank snobbery of New York fashion, the chicanery of Wall Street, and the genius of the almighty dollar, which rules in other cities—Washington, I regret to find, is no better for the angler than Philadelphia. But you get bass fishing in the historic Potomac, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... in England no geniality, no broad, kindly humour, no gaiety. Everything—so far as the outward life is concerned—is hurry, money, noise, ostentation, snobbery, vulgarity, arrogance, discontent, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something; Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... a blow. All his life he had heard vaguely of 'Hamlet'—as a great play that was acted on Broadway. And now here was the author himself! All the instinctive snobbery of the Ghetto toward the grand world was excited. And yet this seedy figure conflicted painfully with his ideas of the uptown type. But perhaps all dramatists were alike. Pinchas ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... and was frequented by every one of distinction in 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
... carpenter, knew the exact value of a centime; there was no question of keeping up impossible appearances, but a general frankness with regard to the fundamental values of clothing, food, and education that all shared alike and made no pretence about. Any faintest sign of snobbery, for instance, would have been drummed out of the little mountain hamlet at once by Gygi, the gendarme, who spent more time in his fields and vineyards than in his uniform. And, while every one knew that a title and ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of the masses," laughed Mr. Cameron. "Elegant persons refused to use anything so cheap. Snobbery existed among the ancients, you see, quite as extensively as in our own day, and a possession was only valuable while it was the property of the fortunate few. The instant it came within the reach of everybody it was ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... damage to their child; afraid lest she should be mixed up with something low, outcast, suspected. Not all my father's intellectual brilliance, nor all my mother's native wit, could save them from this pathetic, vulgar, ignorant piece of snobbery. Pathetic, vulgar, and ignorant, because, if they had only known it, Rosalind stood to lose nothing she cared for by allying herself with a Jewish painter of revolutionary theories. Not a single person whose friendship she cared for but would be as much ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... toggery, 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Saxeville, would delight him. He would devote an entire page to the description of her coat of arms—three azure panels, and so on. And I should read it, for Balzac made all the world beautiful, even snobbery. All interesting people are Balzacians. The moment I know that a man is an admirer of Balzac, a sort of Freemasonry is established between us, and I am interested in him, as I should be in a man who had loved a ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of snobbery and immunity from any taint of it was so fine a characteristic of public social life at Tilling, the expected passage of this distinguished visitor through the town on Saturday next became very speedily known, and before the wicker-baskets of the ladies in their morning marketings next day ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... higher and her backbone just a little stiffer than that of the average colored person because of pride—family pride—in her people—her white people. And as one can readily see from her testimony, her chief cause for her pardonable snobbery seems to be that her Massa was the last man to surrender and "swear ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... refuge from the [v.03 p.0387] uncongenial world of every day. Jules Lemaitre, a less sympathetic critic, finds in the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary views, his dandyism and snobbery, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... hands were against her and her hand against all men. When she had time to think about it, she fully recognized that most of the admiration and kindness tendered to her by the other passengers was entirely worthless, and merely the result of snobbery. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... there feud and malice between two houses, and Aunt Rebecca's wrong-headed freak of cutting the Macnamaras (for it was not 'snobbery,' and she would talk for hours on band-days publicly and familiarly with scrubby little Mrs. Toole), involved her innocent relations in scorn and ill-will; for this sort of offence, like Chinese treason, is not visited on the arch offender only, but according to a scale of consanguinity, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... injustice, with no visible remedies beyond personal denunciation, the prison, and a few coals and blankets, the Determinist method would result in the abolition of lords and burglars, of slums and palaces, of caste and snobbery. There would be no ignorance and no poverty ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... whether they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from 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 is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce commander ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 of examinations,—such ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... 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 tribal taboo—it is, in fact, a survival of the same spirit that ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... a good time, and the atmosphere of good will and jollity was infectious. There was an utter absence of snobbery and affectation, and the boys were delighted to see how quickly the girls fell into the spirit of the gathering and with their own fun and high spirits added more than their ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... not 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 we ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... France, has now, perhaps, entirely disappeared. The war has done little good, that I ever could discover, to any one, but it has delivered the souls of the Church of England clergy who went out to France from the worst form of ecclesiastical snobbery. There are few of those who tried to work in the army who preserve the spirit of social superiority which has had a good deal to do with the dislike of the Church, which has been I imagine, a much more effective cause of "our unhappy divisions" than any of the doctrines men have ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... these class schools like Eton and Harrow and put the money into better board schools. All the kids in my town, and in my state, and in my whole section of the country go to the common schools. Children should start life as equals. There is no snobbery so cruel as the snobbery that marks off childhood into classes! When you women vote here, the first thing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in the meantime ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... ideals of applied art have remained the ideals of the Pompadour; and only by a stern and conscious effort have either women or men been able to escape from them. Everywhere there has spread a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in their efforts at aesthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes even in their clothes, pretend to be ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... down here with your pearls and your simple gingham dress," she felt they were asking, "and get off a lot of this college stuff to us?" What right indeed? She was convinced, in short, that she had been embarked upon a hopeless piece of snobbery, and, finding the whole business distasteful, it had not been ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... daring of speech and deed took Shakespeare by storm. She was his complement in every failing; her strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of pure snobbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble worship was not the way to win a high-spirited girl. He loved her so abjectly that he lost her; and it was undoubtedly his overpowering sensuality and snobbishness which brought him to his knees, and his love to ruin. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and "Jenkins," and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you down. The mention of this book reminds me of another and far racier picture of our island life. The latter parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate. No man's education can ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fell disease of this century called 'snobbery of the soul.' Its germ has been virulently developed in modern cultures from the uncomplex bacillus isolated sixty years ago by the late William Makepeace Thackeray. Precisely as Major Ponto, with his plated dishes ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... fashion of your countenances—you who conceal all these, how little do you think that you left a proof of your weakness in our umbrella-stand—that even now, as you shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in its ivory handle the outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from the exposed gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the hidden hypocrisy of the "dickey"! But alas! even the umbrella is no certain criterion. The falsity and the folly of the human race have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hearsay. Of Jews he knows still less. Not for him the paralyzing sense of the humors of his race, the petty feud of Dutchman and Pole, the mutual superiorities of Sephardi and Ashkenazi, the grotesque incompatibility of Western and Eastern Jew, the cynicism and snobbery of the prosperous, the materialism of the uneducated adventurers in unexploited regions. He stands so high and aloof that all specific colorings and markings are blurred for him into the common brotherhood, and, if he is cynic enough to suspect them, he is philosopher ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... mind, I'm sure. They are very nice, good people, indeed. I'm sure you'll think so. They are all snobs about this place. I never heard of such snobbery in my life. Mrs. So-and-so —over there—once said to me, 'I believe you know all the people who live in those little houses.' She said she wouldn't allow her children even to walk across the green. Did you ever ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... barriers, she could not have aspired to him. But in the kitchen, now become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he had ever seen—in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute clearness that the snobbery of caste was silly, negligible, laughable, contemptible. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen seemed ideal—life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm and that lovely seriousness! ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the day of display or snobbery. The king of snobs, Louis XVI., had died to some purpose, for a wave of manliness had swept across human thought at the beginning of the century. The world has rarely been the poorer for ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... unloosing of the hurricane which he had brought about. Mrs Orgreave used to say that he employed that particular tone from a naughty love of mischief. In a moment all the boys were upon him, except Jimmie, who, out of sheer intellectual snobbery, as the rest averred, supported his father. Atheistical Bradlaugh had been exciting the British public to disputation for a long time, and the Bradlaugh question happened then to be acute. In that very week the Northampton member had been committed to custody ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... beslabbers the meanest and most contemptible of even sham aristocracies, that which is self-conscious, self-glorifying by comparison and forgetful that noblesse oblige? Or what of him when he cunningly and with the vulgar 'cuteness which characterizes the most degraded snobbery, takes pains to make it appear that the labor of another on behalf of the poor white man is meant solely for the negro, and that the former is to be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fair parody of this doctrine. In political science, by a portentous snobbery, the actual evolution of European government was assumed to be in the line of upward progress. Our histories contrasted the benighted condition of past ages with the high morality and general enlightenment of the present. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... majesty of great plans," rejoined Beauty reprovingly. "There's an immense deal in what I'm saying. Think what we might do for society—think how we might extinguish snobbery, if we just dedicated our smash to Mankind. We might open a College, where the traders might go through a course of polite training before they blossomed out as millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of dropped ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... ridiculous look, and has been used by sundry demagogues as a text upon which to orate against the diplomatic service and to arouse popular prejudice against it. But I think that a patriotic American may well take the ground that while there is so much snobbery shown by a certain sort of Americans abroad, it is not an unwise thing to have in each capital a man who in the intervals of his more important duties, can keep this struggling mass of folly from becoming a scandal and a byword throughout ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... this club for 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, containing fifteen ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 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 contemporary literary history—reflects the result of all ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... know, I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare's philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.... The preface to my "Three Plays for Puritans" contains a section headed "Better than Shakespeare?" which ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... illustration of her character. She had no higher ambition than to be a society butterfly. Nyoda sighed, but she knew Gladys was not to blame, for she had been brought up in an artificial atmosphere of fashion and snobbery. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... suspicion or echo of a title. "Very good school," he goes back and says to his wife immediately; "we'll send Tommy there; they have a master who's an honourable or something of the sort; sure to give the boys a thoroughly high gentlemanly tone." It's snobbery, I admit, sheer snobbery: but between ourselves, Maria, most people are snobs, and we have to live, professionally, by accommodating ourselves to ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... at the darned table-cloth and went on: "You look as if you knew what isn't snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours is a good old family, you'll understand it is a necessary part of the story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother's high-and-dry notions, noblesse oblige and all that. Well, my name is Christabel Carstairs; and my father was that ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above his poorer associates ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... honesty and complete fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century [the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there is more to be said—for instance, that Trelawny sometimes reminds us of an extraordinarily intelligent ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... 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 War—they've been respectable ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... talk about "the Shaws." His stage walk, familiar through the cinematograph, is the delight of romantic boys, and betrays his own boyish love of the Paradeschritt. It is frightful to think of the powers which Europe, in its own snobbery, left in the hands of this Peter Pan; and appalling as the results of that criminal levity have been, yet, being by no means free from his romantic follies myself, I do not feel harshly toward Peter, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... being paid well. If England and the Entente only took the trouble to understand the Balkans. Germany has sent her ablest men to Sofia with unlimited credit. The English representatives offend by their snobbery." ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... 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 ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... underrated his snobbery, mentioning only the pardonable and indeed justifiable side of it; the love of fine names and distinguished associations and luxury and good manners.[2] You say repeatedly, and on certain planes, truly, that he was not bitter and did not use his tongue to wound people. But this ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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 ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... civilians accepted it with contemptible humility. It was almost pathetic to observe how people, just on the border-line, received with humble thankfulness such crumbs of recognition as were occasionally thrown to them. Snobbery increases in offensiveness when ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now the ark that floats triumphant over the democratic wave; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it when the waters ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... a snob if I choose, and he hasn't. My snobbery is the right sort: the 'I will maintain' kind. He'd give all the hair on his head to have the right to that sort of snobbery. His is" (she chanted in a high light maddening voice): "Oh, God, let me climb. Yank me up into the paradise of San Francisco society. Burlingame, Alta, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Mr. Winnington to spend. It's in you—it's just in you—to throw everything over—to forget everything you've felt, and everything you've vowed—and just wallow in luxury and selfishness and snobbery! Gertrude's absolutely right. But you shan't do it! You shan't put a hand to it! Why did that man take the guardianship? Now it's his business. He may see to it! But you—you ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not snobbery or goodyism on Stephen's part. He is not writing a make-believe letter, to deceive me as to the way in which he is spending his time. He really had rather occupy his evening in reading than in going to Mrs. Tolman's party,—or to Mrs. Anybody's party,—and, at the present ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... Request The Unfairness of Things Daffodils A Household Book Lunch The Friend of Man The Diary Habit Midsummer Day At the Bookstall "Who's Who" A Day at Lord's By the Sea Golden Fruit Signs of Character Intellectual Snobbery A Question of Form A Slice of Fiction The Label The Profession Smoking as a Fine Art The Path to Glory A Problem in Ethics The Happiest Half-hours of Life Natural Science On Going Dry A Misjudged Game A Doubtful Character Thoughts on Thermometers ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... a second exhibition of snobbery after Harrington joined us, Mrs. Eaton disappointed me. I think she held the young gentleman in too much awe for a free exercise of the vanity that was in her. She did not even mention 'the duke,' and I remarked that this personage kept on another portion ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... is this peculiarity among Americans: many of them will spend their last dollar to be able to say at the end of his journey that he came upon the fashionable boat, just as in England you find many people desirous of making it known that they travelled "first-class." Snobbery is peculiar to no country—it ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... speaking of that. My point is that we must wake up to two things. First of all, we must never make the mistakes that you did in the North when you built up your educational system. That means no pedantry, or classical snobbery. We mustn't go that way. Our way is plain though. I see it more clearly every time I think the matter over—we must train the intelligence ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... the scene, then we justify all our weaknesses, our compromises, and our snobbery, by saying: ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... slitting comrades' noses. You'll meet him—as a Muscovite—dead set On making civic life a sombre Hades, Shaking a knife with tyrant's blood red-wet, Or—aping "Paris-goods" in art, dress, ladies. You'll spy him—as a Yankee—gassing loud About his pride, and yet chin-deep in snobbery; Leaving State matters to corruption's crowd, And justifying (literary) robbery. Whilst as a Briton! Bless us, 'twould take time To picture Homo in his guise Britannic. Here he is making a fine art of crime, There he is fussing in a Puritan panic; Here with MCMUCK he plays the prurient ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... drearily superfluous. However, this periodic, say quarterly, mark of kinsman's comity was required of her by her father, a clannish man by inheritance, and one who, feeling unable to "do" anything especial for his sister's children, yet shrank from the knocking suspicion of snobbery. In the matter of intermealing, reciprocity was formally observed between the two families. Four times per annum the Cooneys were invited in a body to dine at the House of Heth, Mrs. Heth on these occasions speaking caustically of her consort's relatives, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... I. 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? ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... but there are many more that will beset us in the attempt to understand Berlioz. To get at the man himself one must break down a wall of prejudice and pedantry, of convention and intellectual snobbery. In short, one must shake off nearly all current ideas about his work if one wishes to extricate it from the dust that has drifted about it for ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... shouldnt let his son marry my daughter. And thats the test, mind. Thats the test. You feel as I do. You are a snob in fact: I am a snob, not only in fact, but on principle. I shall go down in history, not as the first snob, but as the first avowed champion of English snobbery, and its first martyr in the army. The navy boasts two such martyrs in Captains Kirby and Wade, who were shot for refusing to fight under Admiral Benbow, a promoted cabin boy. I have always ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the tenderest feelings, very apt to be cajoled into doing what the world calls foolish things, and constantly performing feats of unwisdom, which performances he was immoderately laughing at all the while in his books. No man has impaled snobbery with such a stinging rapier, but he always accused himself of being a snob, past all cure. This I make no doubt was one of his exaggerations, but there was a grain of truth in the remark, which so sharp an observer as himself could not fail to notice, even ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... minor artist will wish to take credit.[19] For the money a judicious purchaser could have made one of the finest collections in England. The unholy alliance has no use for contemporary art. The supply is considerable and the names are not historic. Snobbery makes acceptable the portrait of a great lady, though it be by Boldini; and even Mr. Lavery may be welcome if he come with the picture of a king. But how are our ediles to know whether a picture of a commoner, or of some inanimate and undistinguished object, by Degas ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... is, there was enough of her New England mother in Cecily to keep her chin up. She never fawned. She never truckled. She was direct and honest, and free from taint of snobbery, and a society perhaps the most restlessly, self-distrustfully snobbish in the world marveled and admired and accepted. Gay, high-spirited, kind in her somewhat thoughtless way, clever, independent of thought and standard, with a certain sweet and wistful vigor ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed, conceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among the northern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced than among the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery in society, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live on different intellectual planes and often have different religions. Some educated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... why you object and how silly your grounds are," he said. "It's snobbery in you, you know. Now in me it's good sound sense. Because in the first place, if I were ten years younger, and ten times richer, and rather more of a man, I should like to marry her myself; and in the second place I'm not sure Quisante hasn't forged, or isn't ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... devised especially for the preparation of youthful Russian nobility for their respective places in the military, possibly the official, world. As it presently turned out, these great schools were destined to become hot-beds of tyranny, intrigue, rivalry, caste-feeling, and snobbery in their worst forms. Hence, considering the certain future of each cadet, the Corps afforded an even more adequate preparation for bureaucratic methods than their creator had had reason to expect. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... class-symbol. In living with people who have been brought up to different ways of life, a consideration of cleanliness is forced upon one; for nothing else rouses so instantaneously and violently the latent snobbery that one would fain be rid of. Religiously, politically, we are men and brothers all. Yet still—there are men we simply cannot treat as brothers. By what term of contempt (in order to justify our unbrotherliness) can we call them? Not poor men; for we have Poor ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... for you, child, and if you can bear with an old woman's company for a while I think I can find you something to do." That evening Helen left for England with the duchess, a piece of "ingratitude, indelicacy, and shameless snobbery," which Miss de Laine was never weary of dilating upon. "And to think I introduced her, though she ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... equality demanded with the boys of Lima Street. Had his mother had her way, he would never have been allowed to play with them at all; but his father would sometimes break out into fierce tirades against snobbery and hustle him out of the house to amuse himself with half-a-dozen little girls looking after a dozen babies in dilapidated perambulators, and countless smaller boys and girls ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... has 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 ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... 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 as the Earl of ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... of 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
... nothing else—in France and elsewhere. We needed a word for the individual who busies himself with, or drives an automobile, and so we have adapted the word chauffeur. Purists may cavil, but nevertheless the word is better than driver, or motor-man (which is the quintessence of snobbery), or conductor. ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... exceptional owing to his birth and breeding. It had given her a distinct satisfaction, the night of the dinner, to observe that he lost nothing by contact with men who were indubitably of her own world. There was no snobbery in her attitude. She had always been too secure in her own exalted state for snobbery, too protected from climbers to conceive the "I will maintain" impulse, and she had escaped at birth that overpowering sense of superiority that carks the souls of ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... high appeal. Thus for such warfare the efficiency of voluntary effort and cooperation is superior. An autocracy would better rule its soldiers by a military caste; there can be no excuse for such in a democracy. Thus, the utmost possible fraternization of officers and men is desirable, and social snobbery, the snubbing of officers who come up from the ranks, and other anachronistic survivals, should be stamped out, as utterly foreign to what should be the spirit of the military ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... them civilly. They took her curtness for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people were laughing over ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... a matter of common knowledge," Dr. Cripps said; "but one about which, for reasons of policy, or, more truly, of snobbery, it is the fashion to keep silent. So, for goodness' sake, don't give me as your authority if you should ever have occasion ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... frown rose to Jane's smooth forehead. Reference to snobbery brought up a vision of Marian ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... brick castle, with its paltry half-dozen acres, entered by lodges of the utmost pretension, and his coach-houses full of flashy carriages, with the family coat-of-arms(!) upon each, I thought the whole place one of the most contemptible patches of snobbery on this fair earth; and I was glad my father's toil-bleared eyes were hid in the grave, so that they should not have the shame of resting ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... music of "Onward Christian Soldiers" faded away, and Peter and his lady went out from the Church of the Divine Compassion, and strolled on the avenue again, and when they had sufficiently filled their nostrils with the sweet odors of snobbery, they turned into the park, where there were places of seclusion for young couples interested in each other. But alas, the fates which dogged Peter in his love-making had prepared an especially cruel prank that morning. At the entrance to the park, whom should Peter meet ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... But it is to be noticed that the poets of this realm have not been 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
... the isolation was infinitely preferable to the narrow-minded and unfriendly intimacy of society in a country town with its snobbery and cliques. To be mistress of her own home and to be able to look after and mother her dearly-loved brother was a pleasant change from her position as a cipher in the household of a crotchetty, unsympathetic, maiden aunt. And fortunately for her the charm of the silent forest ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... court-room had undergone considerable change. The girl that he had put upon a pedestal to worship from afar, the girl to whom he had given an idealistic love, he saw now in another light. His reverence for her had died hard, but in the face of her arrogance, her vindictiveness and her petty snobbery it had finally succumbed, so that when he compared her with the girl who had been of the street the latter suffered in no way ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... are at the present day a great number of people who will not see that Bolshevism is as snobbish as Suburbia, that the poor man in the Park Lodge is as much a snob as his master, who only knows the county folks. Snobbery is not the monopoly of any one set; even also is it, as Thackeray says,'a mean admiration' that thinks it is better to be a 'made' peer ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... 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 ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... say that a fashionable portrait painter often receives L900 for his name, and L100 for the value of the picture to the sitter as a portrait. It is the artist's autograph with a dash of something attached." I asked, "Why should snobbery tempt those away from an honest, well-painted portrait by a less-known man, to accept a failure with a Society signature?" a query that was replied to by my receiving any number of letters from all over the country asking me to recommend artists; in fact, at the time I might ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... sons to forget the lessons of the sires; but we have a right to demand from the general government the rooting out of all snobbery at West Point, whether it is of that kind which sends poor white boys to Coventry, because they haven't a family name or wealth, or whether it be that smallest, meanest, and shallowest of all ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... with most of those that pretend to love serious music, a certain person was for long guilty of the pitiful snobbery of rating march-tunes as the lowest form of the art. But one day he joined a National Guard regiment, and his first long march was that heart-breaking dress-parade of about fifteen miles through the wind and dust of the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... tan of the range-rider's cheeks the color flamed. This young woman had not mistaken the friendliness of the West for the impudence of a street masher. The impulse of snobbery had expressed ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... groping for causes! Hal had thought her excitement was due to humiliation, or to fear of a scene of violence when she reached home; but she was thinking of the deeper aspects of this terrible drink problem. There was still enough unconscious snobbery in Hal Warner for him to be surprised at this phenomenon in a common miner's daughter; and so, as at their first meeting, his pity was ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... 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. Still, there is enough ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 Pogram; but he might like the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization of childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions for children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set free to ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... of showing at least as much pride as Lord Chesterfield in the affair of the Dictionary; "but mine," he said, "was defensive pride." He was always on his guard against the very appearance of accepting the patronage of the great. Even Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of snobbery in him. At Inverary he would not let Boswell call before dinner lest it should look like fishing for an invitation; and when he dined there the next day and sat next the Duke, he did not refrain, even in that Whig holy of holies, from chaffing ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... life, which owes its very being to France, as impressionism, cubism, etc. Except among the very rich, where, as elsewhere, temptations are many and pressing, they have few scandals to discuss, but much gossip, and there is the ever recurrent flutter over births, marriages, deaths. They have no snobbery in the climber's sense. When a bourgeois, however humble in origin, graduates as an "intellectual" he is received with enthusiasm (if his table manners will pass muster) by the noblesse; but it is far more difficult for a nobleman to enter the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and brothers have taught them, and one which they have apparently 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
... than half disarmed by those who have the moral courage to say. "I can't afford it." Fair-weather friends are of no use whatever, except as an indication of the depth of snobbery to which human beings can descend. What is "a visiting connection"? It is not at all calculated to elevate one in social, or even in business life. Success mainly depends upon character, and the general esteem in which a person is held. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... seem hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his books, no perfect characters. Even ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... these days! For a guinea one's presence can be recorded at a dinner, or an at home, or one's departure from town can be notified to the world in general in a paragraph all to one's self—a paragraph which rubs shoulders with those concerning the highest in the land. The snobbery of the "social column" would really be amusing were it not so painfully apparent. A good press-agent will, for a fee, give one as much publicity and newspaper popularity as that enjoyed by a duke, ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux |
