Laudator Temporis Acti

Stella Bowen (1893-1947), Drawn from Life (1941; rpt. London: Virago, 1984), p. 152:

We began to meet folk with money. I felt awkward with people whose ways of living enabled them to ignore the soucis which governed the lives of ordinary people, who skimmed the cream and knew nothing of the dregs, and who dropped whatever bored them at a moment's notice. It was as though they belonged to a different race to whom the law of gravity did not apply, for they never came down to earth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), "The Rich Boy," The Short Stories (1989; rpt. New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 317-349 (at 318):

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.