Class Privilege Quotes

#1. Nixon finding areas of agreement with his Democratic adviser, as when Pat writes to him, "I do not know, but strongly suspect, that especially to working-class America, the misbehavior of [college] students is seen as a form of class privilege. Which it is.

Stephen Hess

#2. He fate of the poor both locally and globally will to a grave extent determine the quality of life for those who are lucky enough to have class privilege. Repudiating exploitation by word and deed is a gesture of solidarity with the poor.

Bell Hooks

#3. Clementine learned to feel bad about her white middle-class privilege long before it became fashionable.

Liane Moriarty

#4. I have never experienced racism in the feminist movement, so it concerned me to think that I was unable to see the subject clearly because I came from white, middle-class privilege.

Betty Buckley

#5. Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

Gunter Grass

#6. My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad's union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.

Ezra Koenig

#7. If it is to be taken seriously again, the Left must find its voice. There is much to be angry about: growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity; injustices of class and caste; economic exploitation at home and abroad; corruption and money and privilege occluding the arteries of democracy.

Tony Judt

#8. She wondered which would be worse -- to belong to the group assigned to lifelong drudgery, or to be on the other side, thinking you deserved everything the universe by sheer good luck had tossed in your lap, never realizing your whole life was based on lies.

Jo Victor

#9. There is only one class of men, the privileged class

Albert Camus

#10. 'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

Laura Wade

#11. They would swear that the United States was their number one enemy, and yet carrying a pack of Marlboro Lights seemed to be a sign of privilege and class.

Suki Kim

#12. There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

Leonard Woolf

#13. Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

John Fowles

#14. The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We'd all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.

David Sedaris

#15. Under this [Bush] Administration, America's middle class has been abandoned
its dreams denied, its Main Street interests ignored and its mainstream values scorned by a White House that puts privilege first.

John F. Kerry

#16. I didn't grow up with great privilege, nor did I grow up wanting for anything. I was a middle-class kid and, relative to the rest of the world, that's great wealth.

Matt Damon

#17. There's definitely privilege in the upper classes, but as a whole, music can be enjoyed by anybody who can gather around a radio.

Geoff Rickly

#18. subordinate groups are often pitted against one another in ways that draw attention away from the system of privilege that hurts them all.

Allan G. Johnson

#19. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Woodrow Wilson

#20. He's [G.H.W. Bush] never had to do a day's work in his life.

Bob Dole

#21. England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

George Orwell

#22. I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.

Erin McKeown

#23. I know this kind of girl," Grace was saying. "It's the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven.

Gary Shteyngart

#24. For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality.

Nancy Pelosi

#25. I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

Sara Sheridan

#26. The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

Matthew Arnold

#27. Modern invention has been a great leveler. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.

Ivor Brown

#28. My background's working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don't come from any sense of privilege.

Jon Bon Jovi

#29. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#30. The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

Aleksandar Hemon

#31. The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

Paulo Freire

#32. All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.

Alice Walker

#33. Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

George Orwell

#34. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.

Tommy Douglas

#35. The privilege of privilege is that the terms of privilege are rendered invisible. It is a luxury not to have to think about race, or class, or gender. Only those marginalized by some category understand how powerful that category is when deployed against them.

Michael Kimmel

#36. The bus was crowded, standing room only, and he clung apelike from a bar that hung down from the ceiling. It was humiliating to be packed in with all these people; it reminded him of a cattle car or worse, a sardine can, or worse...but what could be worse than this?

Joseph G. Peterson

#37. A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

Robert B. Reich

#38. The laboring man and the trade-unionist, if I understand him, asks only equality before the law. Class legislation and unequal privilege, though expressly in his favor, will in the end work no benefit to him or to society.

William Howard Taft