Leadership Quote by John Buchan

Snobbery, in Buchan's framing, isn’t a taste for the finer things so much as a hunger for fences. The line works because it flips a common alibi: the snob claims refinement, discernment, standards. Buchan strips that away and names the real appetite - separation itself. What’s being craved isn’t excellence but exclusion, the little social thrill of knowing who doesn’t belong.

As a politician writing in an era when class felt like architecture (Victorian inheritance lingering into the shocks of modern mass politics), Buchan’s definition is pointedly civic. He isn’t diagnosing a personality quirk; he’s warning about a public disposition that corrodes solidarity. “What unites them” gestures toward the democratic idea that citizens share obligations and a basic moral equivalence. The snob, by contrast, treats society as a ladder whose purpose is to keep people on different rungs, even when they’re standing in the same storm.

The subtext is that snobbery is active, not passive: “craves” implies desire, pursuit, even addiction. It’s not merely that some people happen to live apart; it’s that they need the apartness to feel real. That’s why the quote still bites in a culture of status signals and algorithmic sorting. Buchan’s snob isn’t just rude; he’s invested in fragmentation, because unity would flatten the very distinctions he’s built his identity around.