The Great Gatsby is a social commentary on the effects of new wealth on America’s original upper class.
The novel features characters who are rich in money but poor in morals, and it sharply critiques the shallowness and hollowness that often accompany great wealth.
Through his characters, Fitzgerald explores how changes in social class can impact relationships, morality, and one’s sense of self.
In doing so, he raises important questions about money and social status’s role in our lives.
The Great Gatsby Quotes With Page Numbers
The Great Gatsby Quotes About Social Class
“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 7
“In my younger . . . years my father gave me some advice . . . “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one . . . just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick quoting his father), Chapter 1, Page 7
“I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard … My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 9
“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach — but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway about Tom Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 9
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 1, Page 13
“Civilization’s going to pieces. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things…The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Tom Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 13
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Tom Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 13
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow, she went on . . . “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything . . . Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 16
“The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the Narrator about Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 1, Page 16
“Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the Narrator about Myrtle Wilson), Chapter 2, Page 23
“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.
She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Myrtle Wilson), Chapter 2, Page 24
“You see,’ cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. ‘It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.’
Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Catherine about Daisy and Tom), Chapter 2, Page 25
“I married [George] because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Myrtle Wilson), Chapter 2, Pages 25-26
“I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the Narrator), Chapter 2, Page 26
“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and he champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his motor-boats slid the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 28
“I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited – they went there.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 3, Page 29
“I’ll tell you God’s truth.’ His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. ‘I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Jay Gatsby), Chapter 4, Page 42
“Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 44
The Great Gatsby The Valley of Ashes Quotes
“By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 4, Page 48
“Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 5, Page 56
“The rich get richer and the poor get – children.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick and Daisy), Chapter 5, Page 60
“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick Carraway about Jay Gatsby), Chapter 5, Page 62
“She was appalled by West Egg…by its raw vigor that chafed…and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Nick Carraway about Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 6, Page 68
“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.”
“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.
“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Characters: Tom Buchanan and Jordan Baker), Chapter 7, Page 76
“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.’
‘Yes – I went there.’
Pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting: ‘You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.’
Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but, the silence was unbroken by his ‘thank you.’ and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.
‘I told you I went there,’ said Gatsby.
‘I heard you, but I’d like to know when.’
‘It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.’
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 7, Page 80
“I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out….Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Tom Buchanan), Chapter 7, Page 81
‘She’s not leaving me!’ Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. ‘Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.’
‘I won’t stand this!’ cried Daisy. ‘Oh, please let’s get out.’
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Tom Buchanan about Daisy and Jay Gatsby), Chapter 7, Page 83
“Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway about Daisy Buchanan), Chapter 8, Page 93
“We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around.
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby), Chapter 8, Page 95
“I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.
“Left no address?”
“No.”
“Say when they’d be back?”
“No.”
“Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?”
“I don’t know. Can’t say.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Nick Carraway on the phone asking about Tom and Daisy), Chapter 9, Page 100
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (Character: Nick Carraway as the narrator), Chapter 9, Page 109
The Great Gatsby Social Class Theme
The theme of social class is a central focus of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The stratification of society is evident, particularly through the contrast between East Egg and West Egg residents.
Narrator Nick Carraway’s observation, “I lived at West Egg, the – well, the least fashionable of the two,” highlights the disparity between old-money and new-money societies.
The tension between these social classes is further revealed in Myrtle Wilson’s disdainful remarks about “the shiftlessness of the lower orders,” signifying her desire to distance herself from the lower class.
A stark commentary on wealth and privilege comes from Daisy’s interaction with Nick, where she remarks, “The rich get richer and the poor get – children,” illuminating the perception that wealth directly dictates one’s social standing.
Nick’s statement, “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry,” underscores the resistance towards the defined class system.
Further deepening the exploration of social classes, Jay Gatsby, born into a lower-class farming family, fabricates an entirely new identity. He claims that he’s the son of wealthy individuals, epitomizing the pursuit of upward social mobility.
Thus, through these carefully crafted interactions and character developments, The Great Gatsby explores the rigid class divisions of 1920s American society. These quotes show how they dictate individual identities, aspirations, and perceptions.