284 Class Quotes

Yeah, there are too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely, you know. That's what I don't like.

We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.

Writing, madam, is a mechanic part of wit. A gentleman should never go beyond a song or a billet.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.

The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

About the only thing we have left that actually discriminates in favor of the plain people is the stork.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

The public needs the equivalent of Chevrolets as well as Cadillacs.

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.

Has knowledge of birth control, so carefully guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class - and so tenaciously withheld from the working women - brought them misery? Rather, has it not promoted greater happiness, greater freedom, greater prosperity and more harmony among them? The women who have this knowledge are the women who have been free to develop, free to enjoy in its best sense, and free to advance the interests of the community.

Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.

It's the middle class that feels the luxury of being able to have causes.

And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts... could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air.

My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. ... At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.

This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word 'kleptomania' is a vulgar example of what I mean. It is on a par with that strange theory, always advanced when a wealthy or prominent person is in the dock, that exposure is more of a punishment for the rich than for the poor. Of course, the very reverse is the truth. Exposure is more of a punishment for the poor than for the rich. The richer a man is the easier it is for him to be a tramp. The richer a man is the easier it is for him to be popular and generally respected in the Cannibal Islands. But the poorer a man is the more likely it is that he will have to use his past life whenever he wants to get a bed for the night. Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

Quelle atroce invention que celle du bourgeois, n'est-ce pas?

'When Hillary had the class reunion at the White House, there were 325 of us there,' said Catherine S. Gidlow, a lawyer in St. Louis. 'I turned to someone and said, 'I think there are 324 of us here who feel like failures,' and she said, 'No, I think there are 325 of us who feel like failures.''

Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find.

Fay: Have you known him long? Hal: We shared the same cradle. Fay: Was that economy or malpractice? Hal: We were too young then to practice and economics still defeat us.

With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters' shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors', delicatessens. (pp. 23-24)

A bohemian imitates the manners of the class below him.

George:Lord knows you don't need no brains to buck barley. ('Buck' here means to work at lifting and throwing the sacks of barley.)

Joni, you have more class than Richard Nixon, Mick Jagger, and Gomer Pyle combined!

When I am gone, the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens.

Is that to say we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions in a single group, where they will stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletariat.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.

In case you haven't noticed, we:dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything. Piece of cake.

So the majority of the highest classes of that age. even the popes and ecclesiastics, really believed in nothing at all. They did not believe in the Church doctrine, for they saw its insolvency; but neither could they follow Francis of Assisi, Kelchitsky, and most of the sectarians in acknowledging the moral, social teaching of Christ, for that undermined their social position. And so these people remained without any religious view of life. And, having none, they could have no standard with which to estimate what was good and what was bad art, but that of personal enjoyment.

You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.

All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.

His noble negligences teach What others' toils despair to reach.

'Welfare mothers make better lovers.' - 'Welfare Mothers'

My sister lives in New York and she was struck by how class-ridden the reviews were. Everyone had to mention that I'm posh. British people are obsessed by that. I said to John, 'I'm not posh.' Is my voice posh?'

Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)

Has there ever been a musician of cultural significance who's been aware they're significant? Maybe it's a generation whose parents came from a working class environment and because they were rootless in a way, like me and him, they latched onto that as an identity. Maybe we romanticise what our parents wanted to escape from. We're, like, fantasising out a living.

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new 'class conflict' between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people. -- Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995)

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the 'bourgeois' under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource. -- Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

Night makes no difference 'twixt the Priest and Clerk; Joan as my Lady is as good i' the dark.

How do you get to the Met? Money, lots and lots of money.

[Of Lord Chesterfield] This man, I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!

My friend was of opinion that when a man of rank appeared in that character [as an author], he deserved to have his merit handsomely allowed.

Every now and then they were awarded prizes - Self-Help by Smiles, and other books suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties.

All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes - and woman accepts the proposal! - To vary that old, old saying a little bit - I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!

Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob.

'Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been crudely determined by whether or not he accepted money. At times false pride became conscious criticism.'

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.

Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up. Natalie : Alexander! I won't have that word... Herzen: Sorry, middle-class.

Trinny Woodall knows everyone in Belgravia who earns more than ?10 million a year so she got on the phone and the rest of us just went to the pub, it was great!

Les mortels sont egaux; ce n'est pas la naissance, C'est la seule vertu qui fait la difference.

Qui sert bien son pays n'a pas besoin d'aieux.

But the mass of the old electors did not analyse very much: they liked to have one of their 'betters' to represent them; if he was rich they respected him much; and if he was a lord, they liked him the better. The issue put before these electors was, which of two rich people will you choose? And each of those rich people was put forward by great parties whose notions were the notions of the rich - whose plans were their plans. The electors only selected one or two wealthy men to carry out the schemes of one or two wealthy associations.

Ye who, borne about in chariots and sedans know no fatigue but that of idleness.

Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.

The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.

A black, middle-class kid, even though his parents may be middle income - maybe they're first-generation middle class - has also been affected by race issues.

Class-based affirmative action is good in its own right, but it is not a substitute for race-based affirmative action.

'Every official that comes in, cripples us, leaves us maimed, silent and tame, and with our flesh and bones he builds his homes.'

I had a soul above buttons.

Mated with a squalid savage - what to me were sun or clime? I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time -

I spoke to my young host: 'If you would, tell me the meaning of the bronze figure in the shape of shameful parts hanging from the man's belt. I had seen a number of them at court when I was living in a cage, but as I was almost always in the company of the Queen's daughters, I was afraid I might show disrespect to the women and their social status if I brought up such a gross subject of conversation in their presence. 'Here, neither females nor males are so ungrateful as to blush at the sight of what has given them being; and virgins are not ashamed to like to see us wear the only thing that goes by that name, as a token of mother nature. 'The sash that honors that man carries a medallion in the form of a virile member. It is the sign of a nobleman and distinguishes the noble from the commoner.' I admit that this paradox seemed so outlandish that I could not keep from laughing at it. 'This custom seems quite extraordinary to me,' I said to my young host, 'because in our world the mark of nobility is to wear a sword.' He replied calmly, 'O little man, how insane the nobles of your world must be if they pride themselves on a tool used by executioners, one that is made only to destroy and that is, in the end, the sworn enemy of all that lives. And they hide, on the contrary, a part of the body without which we would not exist, one that is the Prometheus of every animal and tirelessly repairs the weaknesses of nature! How unfortunate a country is where the marks of generation are ignominious and those of annihilation are honorable! And you call that member one of the 'shameful parts', as though anything were more glorious than to give life and anything more infamous than to take it away.'

Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds-the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the 'boss' is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets 'laid off' nor has to go on a strike for higher wages.

Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only 'frail.' They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all--liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.

Then soon after my delight with Stein was jolted; a political critic of the reddest persuasion condemned Stein in a newspaper article, calling her decadent, implying that she reclined upon a silken couch in Paris smoking hashish day and night and was a hopeless prey to hallucinations. I asked myself if I were wrong or crazy or decadent. Being simple minded, I decided upon a very practical way of determining the worth of the prose of Stein, a prose I had accepted without qualms or distress. I gathered a group of semi-illiterate Negro workers into a Chicago basement and read them Melanctha aloud. They were enthralled, interrupting me constantly to tell where and when they had met such a strange and melancholy gal. I was convinced and Miss Stein's book never bothered or frightened me after that. If Negro stockyard workers could understand the stuff when it was read aloud to them, then surely anybody else could if they wanted to read with their ears as well as their eyes. For the prose of Stein is but the repetitive contemporaneousness of our living speech woven into a grammarless form of narrative...

...so long as power remains privately concentrated, everybody, everybody, has to be committed to one overriding goal: and that's to make sure that the rich folk are happy -- because unless they are, nobody else is going to get anything. So if you're a homeless person sleeping in the streets of Manhattan, let's say, your first concern must be that the guys in the mansions are happy -- because if they're happy, then they'll invest, and the economy will work, and things will function, and then maybe something will trickle down to you somewhere along the line. But if they're not happy, everything's going to grind to a halt, and you're not even going to get anything trickling down.

For 2 people to love each other, they have to meet, don't they? And 2 people who live in utterly different worlds have no chance of meeting

The Thames and the Mersey, the Tyne and the Wear and the Clyde They spew slums like gravy on the banks of the poisonous tide What became of the working class? Nike, Reebok, Adidas Scratchcards, pitbulls, ecstasy Hooray for the 21st Century

There are few more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap Yeah, we'll die in the class we were born That's a class of our own, my love

Singers: We've got nothing always had nothing nothing but holes and millions of them Kokol: Living in holes Polpoch: Dying in holes Cucurucu: Holes in our bellies Rossignol: and holes in our clothes

While the rich kids is drivin Benz/I'm still tryin to hold on to my survivin friends