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Quote by Paul A. Barra

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Strangers and Sojourners: A Big Percy Pletcher thriller

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Paul A. Barra

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“This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.”

ArtSacredEtiquetteProfaneUpper ClassAncient EgyptClasses
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm.”

MusicSocietyEntertainmentTheatreOperaUpper Class
Book:Errors of Education
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“Here’s the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do. They were too polite to actually stare. Instead, they did this weird thing of catching sight of Will in their field of vision and then determinedly not looking at him. Until he’d gone past, at which point their gaze would flicker towards him, even while they remained in conversation with someone else. They wouldn’t talk about him, though. Because that would be rude.”

RudenessUpper Class
Book:Me Before You
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“How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades: Tinker. Cooper. Smithy. Maybe it was to hearken back to their seventeenth-century New England bootstraps--the manual trades that had made them stalwart and humble and virtuous in the eyes of their Lord. Or maybe it was just a way of politely understating their predestination to having it all.”

PrivilegeUpper ClassWaspsClassesClass DifferenceTrades
Book:Rules of Civility
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