Mark Twain

“ He's a nobody; because they're all colonels down there. No, Tracy" (shudder from Tracy) "nobody in England would call you a gentleman and you wouldn't call yourself one; and I tell you it's a state of things that makes a man put himself into most unbecoming attitudes sometimes—the broad and general recognition and acceptance of caste as caste does, I mean. Makes him do it unconsciously—being bred in him, you see, and never thought over and reasoned out. ”

“ Since the whole million vote themselves ladies and gentlemen, there is no question about that election. It does make absolute equality, and there is no fiction about it; while over yonder the inequality, (by decree of the infinitely feeble, and consent of the infinitely strong,) is also absolute—as real and absolute as our equality."
Tracy had shrunk promptly into his English shell when this speech began, notwithstanding he had now been in severe training several weeks for contact and intercourse with the common herd on the common herd's terms ”

“ Instead of speaking of a woman as a lady, you substitute clean and say she's a clean person."
"That's it. In England the swell folks don't speak of the working people as gentlemen and ladies?"
"Oh, no."
"And the working people don't call themselves gentlemen and ladies?" ”

“ We don't do that way here. Everybody calls himself a lady or gentleman, and thinks he is, and don't care what anybody else thinks him, so long as he don't say it out loud. You think there's no difference. You knuckle down and we don't. Ain't that a difference?"
"It is a difference I hadn't thought of; I admit that. Still—calling one's self a lady doesn't—er—"
"I wouldn't go on if I were you."
Howard Tracy turned his head to see who it might be that had introduced this remark. ”

“ There isn't any power on earth that can prevent England's thirty millions from electing themselves dukes and duchesses to-morrow and calling themselves so. And within six months all the former dukes and duchesses would have retired from the business. ”

“ He had hunted everywhere for work, descending gradually the scale of quality, until apparently he had sued for all the various kinds of work a man without a special calling might hope to be able to do, except ditching and the other coarse manual sorts—and had got neither work nor the promise of it. ”

“ Of course you would. Don't you ever let a man say you ain't a gentleman in this country. But laws, what am I thinking about? I reckon a body would think twice before he said a cowboy wasn't a gentleman. ”

“ They carry on a good deal, but that's their fun. You see, this room opens right into this back one, and sometimes they're all in one and sometimes in the other; and hot nights they all sleep on the roof when it don't rain. They get out there the minute it's hot enough. The season's so early that they've already had a night or two up there. If you'd like to go up and pick out a place, you can. You'll find chalk in the side of the chimney where there's a brick wanting. You just take the chalk and—but of course you've done it before. ”