Class system - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

As for seeing the town, he did not even think of it, being of that breed of Britons who have their servants do their sightseeing for them.

- Jules Verne, Around theWorld in Eighty Days (1873), translated by William Butcher (1995)

To give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steeper ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable.Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him.

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

''In the moon,'' says Cavor, ''every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.''

- H. G.Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)

There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain [workers and management] unless the heart acts as mediator.

- Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (film, 1926)

, translator unknown (1926)

It was in this world that we found in its most striking form a social disease which is perhaps the commonest of all world-diseases - namely, the splitting of the population into two mutually unintelligible castes through the influence of economic forces.

- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)

In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Ponse was not a villain. He was exactly like the members of every ruling class in history: honestly convinced of his benevolence and hurt if it was challenged.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold (1964)

She looked beyond me, as if at our village, at the Norsemen loading their boats with weeping slaves, at all the villages of Germany and England and France where the poor folk sweat from dawn to dark so that the great lords may do battle with one another, at castles under siege with the starving folk within eating mice and rats and sometimes each other, at the women carried off or raped or beaten, at the mothers wailing for their little ones, and beyond this at the great wide world itself with all its battles which I had used to think so grand, and the misery and greediness and fear and jealousy and hatred of folk one for the other.

- Joanna Russ, ''Souls'' (1982)

He disliked him because he found the idea of someone who was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the world didn't really understand the problems of privileged people, deeply obnoxious.

- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

When the gap between the rich and poor is vast and the middle ground the haunt of an endangered species, snobbery was a defence against terror.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

It has been a psychological refuge of the poor to denigrate their so-called betters, to satirize their excesses and manners and behaviour and pretend they were above such an artificial existence. [. . .] The contempt was a pretence, a shelter to make poverty bearable, even honourable, and so make pride possible.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)