Petit Bourgeois Quotes

“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type – the type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside of a swill-bucket.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“He could put up with his meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his “writing.” Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by “writing;” and you’d feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a “writer,” would you not? The types he saw all around him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That is what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak – Strube’s “little man” – the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the BBC Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife “feels in the mood!” What a fate! No, it isn’t like that that one was meant to live. One’s got to get right out of it, out of the money stink.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“To recall the extent to which Hitchcock was marked by his petit bourgeois interpellation may not radically change the way we read his films. It should, however, remind us that his British films in particular come out of a highly class-structured and class-conscious social formation and are likely to bear the traces of this, even if only in their interstices.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays