The Prime of Life

"Our indifference to money was a luxury we could afford only because we had enough of it to avoid real poverty and the need for hard or unpleasant work. Our open-mindedness was bound up with a cultural background and the sort of social activities accessible only to people of our social class. It was our conditioning as young petit bourgeois intellectuals that led us to believe ourselves free of all conditioning whatsoever."

Simon de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life