Quotes about snob (43 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“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 (1969) Swiss writer

Parting

“Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Tuesday 18 September 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Reading

“Very simply, diverse personalities are to be found in the breast of each of us, and often the life of more than one superior man is nothing but the coexistence of a philosopher and a snob.”

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) French novelist, critic, and essayist

Notes to Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin, translated by Proust (1906); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and William Burford
Context: A man is not more entitled to be "received in good society," or at least to wish to be, because he is more intelligent and cultivated. This is one of those sophisms that the vanity of intelligent people picks up in the arsenal of their intelligence to justify their basest inclinations. In other words, having become more intelligent creates some rights to be less. Very simply, diverse personalities are to be found in the breast of each of us, and often the life of more than one superior man is nothing but the coexistence of a philosopher and a snob. Actually, there are very few philosophers and artists who are absolutely detached from ambition and respect for power, from "people of position." And among those who are more delicate or more sated, snobism replaces ambition and respect for power in the same way superstition arises on the ruins of religious beliefs. Morality gains nothing there. Between a worldly philosopher and a philosopher intimidated by a minister of state, the second is still the more innocent.

Life , Personality

“In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), unplaced by chapter
Context: Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.

Money , Change

“the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople… you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: 100 Selected Poems

“I've got to stop being such a snob about leather-bound books, he reminded himself. E-books do have their moments.”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

Books

“The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 241
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

Men

“I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Source: The Simple Art of Murder

Pleasure , Art , Mathematics , Reading

“it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than thesquarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Love , Youth

“I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

People , Time

“You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."

"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

Hate , People , Effort , Help

“I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Love , Time

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

Dan Rather (1931) Journalist, Anchor

Thinking

“great gandalfs ghost!
if he had a ghost. i doubt it. he was such a snob…”

Margaret Weis book Elven Star

Source: Elven Star

“The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Thackeray (1879), Ch. 2

Wealth

“The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Hotchkiss
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

People

“She was grumbling. “The least he could have done was drop us near a town. Although in these parts they’d probably burn us as witches before asking any questions.” She shuddered. “I’m an awful snob about peasants, I’m afraid.”
I mentioned dryly that I thought those of her political persuasion had some sort of egalitarian duty to resist such prejudice. “Egalitarianism isn’t about prejudices,” she said, “it’s about equal shares of power. It’s the only means we have of steering some sort of even course through a future which is forever, by the very nature of the multiverse, unguessable. We have only institutions and a crude, fragile kind of democracy standing between us and absolute Chaos. That is why we must value and protect those institutions. And be forever reexamining them.””

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 8 “Revolutions” (p. 419)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Democracy , Question , Nature , Future

“It has also been said that your Education has been a failure no matter how much it has done for you, if it has failed to open your heart. Dr. Zakir Hussain, when Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh University, said, that the aim of Education was that students should become responsible citizens and not merely bundles of styles and sophistication like articles in a furniture shop – the product now being churned out lacks even that saving grace….. The old system may have produced 'snobs' what is being spewed out now are 'slobs'. The young student in Indian Schools is being smothered under a dead weight of books and notes dealing with a host of subjects imaginable and unimaginable. Busy cramming from morning till night and repeating parrot-like that he does not understand, he is fast becoming a literate moron. Initiative, leadership and education in the real sense of the term are encouraged only in a few public Schools.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Teachers & Education

Books , Education , School , Imagination

“Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. ix

Sense

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob! There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor and trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college: he wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

speech at Americans for Prosperity Tea Party event at Troy, Michigan,
referring to President Obama saying, in his first address to Congress in , "Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be a community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma."
2012-02-25
Rick Santorum: Obama Is ‘A Snob’ For Wanting Everyone To Go To College
James
Crugnale
Mediaite
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rick-santorum-obama-is-a-snob-for-wanting-everyone-to-go-to-college/

Women , Men , Children , People

“I have met [a proselytizer from a religious group]. I did not like him. He seemed to me to be a snob. He spoke of God as if He were the oldest title in the Almanach de Gotha. And all that business about telling one's sins in public -- He wanted me … me … to get up before my children and confess everything I had ever done! It is spiritual nudism! Ça se ne fait pas.”

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania (1875–1938) last Queen consort of Romania as the wife of King Ferdinand I

qtd. in Beverely Nichols, All I Could Never Be (1952)

God , Children , Business

“The supreme style of love is unknown love. If the affection is known by the beloved, that love is snob. If you sacrifice your life for the beloved, and she recognises your love after you die, your soul would be appraised.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

Love , Life , Soul

“Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a Philistine.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Movies, the Desperate Art" (1956)

“Bus driver, bus driver, the sirens have gone,
The bombs may come down, but the buses go on;
Bus driver, I know you won't think me a snob
If I whisper: "Bus driver, I don't want your job."”

A. P. Herbert (1890–1971) British politician

"Seeing It Through", London Transport poster by Eric Kennington (1944).

Thinking

“Mrs. Brisbane-Brown was a relic, but only the unthinking would have called her a snob. For snobbishness implies some sense of insecurity, and she was perfectly secure.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 6

Sense

“My publication was for a fine purpose. Certain snobs may now look down on it and call it common or even pornographic, but until the end of the war, I had Hitler's greatest respect, and Der Stürmer had the party's complete support. At our height, we had a circulation of 1.5 million. Everybody read Der Stürmer, and they must have liked it or they wouldn't have bought it. The aim of Der Stürmer was to unite Germans and to awaken them against Jewish influence which might ruin our noble culture.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

War , Support , Reading

“The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves…”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 144

Education , Art

“The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

A Handful of Sand on the Shore

Tear , Laughter

“My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.”

Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000) Armenian-American composer

Alan Hovhaness, Hovhaness.com biography http://www.hovhaness.com/hovhaness-biography.html

People , Beauty , Music

“A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

Spiro Agnew (1918–1996) 39th Vice President of the United States

Denouncing Moratorium Day protest against Vietnam War; in NY "Times," 20 Oct 69

“Netflix has already gone mainstream. Not mainstream but they’ve gone snob. They have an angry housewife who’s making all the selections.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

CraveOnline http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/507781-exclusive-cannes-interview-lloyd-kaufman-on-nuke-em-high May 28, 2013
2013

“Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden (1959) American science fiction editor, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, and teacher

"Oh No Lev Grossman No", in Making Light (30 August 2009)

Music , Guy , Singing

“Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust's tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Marcel Proust', p. 579
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

The Book of Snobs http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/snobs10.txt (1848), ch. 2.

“Mrs. Krantz, having dined at Mark's Club, insists that it is exclusive. There would not have been much point to her dining there if she did not think that. A bigger snob than she might point out that the best reason for not dining at Mark’s Club is the chance of finding Mrs Krantz there. It takes only common sense, though, to tell you that on those terms exclusiveness in not just chimerical but plain tedious. You would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Thinking , Sense , Chance

“There is a grim and ghastly humor -- the humor that is born of a pathetic philosophy -- which now and then strikes me in reading the bright and keen-witted work of our American paragraphers. It is a humor that may be crystallized by hunger and sorrow and tears. It is not found elsewhere as it is in America. It is out of the question in England, because an Englishman cannot poke fun at himself. He cannot joke about an empty flour-barrel. We can: especially if by doing it we may swap the joke for another barrel of flour. We can never be a nation of snobs so long as we are willing to poke fun at ourselves.”

Edgar Wilson Nye (1850–1896) American journalist, who later became widely known as a humorist

The Century magazine (1892)

Hunger , Question , Tear , Reading

“Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

"The Irony of Liberalism"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Life , People , Happiness

“The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.”

G. K. Chesterton book All Things Considered

"The Case for the Ephemeral"
All Things Considered (1908)
Context: It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. … The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know." To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed’s antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady’s age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

Fashion

“I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

First published in the "Movie Answer Man" column (25 July 2004) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040725/ANSWERMAN/407250305
Context: Many moviegoers and video viewers say they do not "like" black and white films. In my opinion, they are cutting themselves off from much of the mystery and beauty of the movies.
Black and white is an artistic choice, a medium that has strengths and traditions, especially in its use of light and shadow. Moviegoers of course have the right to dislike b&w, but it is not something they should be proud of. It reveals them, frankly, as cinematically illiterate.
I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste.

Imagination

“I will be a sham, but not a snob.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

The small god in Ch. 44 : the visitor
The Visitor (2002)
Context: I will be a sham, but not a snob. I will let every man, woman, or child, no matter how greedy or wicked, claim to have a personal relationship with me. In other words, I will be as arbitrary, inconsistent, ignorant, pushy, and common as humans are, and what more have they ever wanted in a god?

“And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over Shakspeare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their soul in the Elizebethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspers full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even Shakspeare, was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, who in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.—There, I have driven my horse so hard that I have made my inn before sundown.
Letter to Evert Augustus Duyckinck (3 March 1849); published in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960) edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, p. 79

Thinking , Boy

“It seems that the snobs at The New York Times would rather see more teens go ahead and off themselves than find salvation through the Christian faith (imaginary or not).”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-does-hollywood-hate-to-save-a-life

Faith , Time