Quotations about:
    social ladder

The various codes which were presented to you at Crossgates — religious, moral, social, and intellectual — contradicted one another of you worked out their implications. The essential conflict was between the tradition of nineteenth-century asceticism and the actually existing luxury and snobbery of the pre-1914 age. On the one side were low-church Bible Christianity, sex puritanism, insistence on hard work, respect for academic distinction, disapproval of self-indulgence: on the other, contempt for “braininess” and worship of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an almost neurotic dread of poverty, and, above all, the assumption not only that money and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is better to inherit them than to have to work for them. Broadly, you were bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which is impossible.

George Orwell (1903–1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]

Essay (1948-06), “‘Such, Such Were the Joys …’,” sec. 5, Partisan Review (1952-09)
    (Source)

Speaking of the school he attended. This autobiographical essay was drafted around 1939, revised around 1946, and then completed in May or June of 1948. Collected in Such, Such Were the Joys, essay 8 (1953), though the full, unredacted version was not published until 2000.