Class Working Quotes

#1. I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

Nic Pizzolatto

#2. Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.

Israel Horovitz

#3. I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

Dwight Yoakam

#4. I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn't one of them ... I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.

Tracey Ullman

#5. Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.

Yelawolf

#6. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.

Joel Kinnaman

#7. The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.

Ernest Mandel

#8. I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.

Tom Brokaw

#9. When ... asked what I am writing, I have answered, "A book about social class in America," ... It is if I had said, "I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

Paul Fussell

#10. I was very personable and outgoing and was friends with most everybody in my class but I was a diehard dancer so I was constantly at dance classes and working toward my passion of dance.

Jenna Dewan

#11. Eight Hours For What We Will is a major contribution to modern American working-class history and to the history of a changing American popular and mass culture.

Herbert Gutman

#12. There's only one thing that regularly keeps me up at night. Working with the greatest people in the world and knowing that they are counting on me to build a company that endures - a company where they can grow professionally. A company where they can build world-class products and be proud to work.

David Ulevitch

#13. If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!

Mother Jones

#14. I know too much from personal observation from how the poor and working classes live to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.

Vida Goldstein

#15. It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.

Peter Capaldi

#16. Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.

Frank Rich

#17. The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.

Robert Reich

#18. Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

Rosa Luxemburg

#19. The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

Michael Gove

#20. I've been lucky from my earliest memory on. I happened to be born to the right parents, and the lives we led - working class, migratory - suited my personality. I had an adventurous mindset, and we lived on an Army base, then in South Dakota - it was a dynamic environment.

Tom Brokaw

#21. Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

Margaret Sanger

#22. I feel that I helped the working class by just saying there are no barriers, which I consider to be true.

Michael Caine

#23. I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

Tom Jones

#24. I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

Bobby Sands

#25. I feel like going to class every morning is so humbling. You're always working to improve, and you're always being critiqued on your next performance. It's not about what you've done. There's always room to grow.

Misty Copeland

#26. I'm a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family.

R.A. Salvatore

#27. I am who I am: an Irish Catholic kid, working class from Long Island. And I made it big.

Bill O'Reilly

#28. Part of the creative journey for me was not to come up the conventional route. I didn't go through drama school. I chose not to. I came from a very working-class area, a child of Nigerian immigrants.

DeObia Oparei

#29. It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

Barbara Kruger

#30. But beyond the hysteria of phantom death panels, where is the abomination? Show me the provisions that will hurt consumers, because if you think a $110 billion a year tax break for working-class Americans to buy private health insurance is a government takeover, I welcome the debate.

Jim McDermott

#31. That's the choice they allow you - now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit.

John Lennon

#32. I'm working hard to be president of the United States.I'm running to change things, and I'm not going to be part of the political class in Washington, D.C. I have the skills to disrupt the old order and bring about a new culture.

Jeb Bush

#33. We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Raymond Williams

#34. The best real-estate investments with the highest yields are in working-class neighborhoods, because fancy properties are overpriced.

Jane Bryant Quinn

#35. Historians have generally described the coming of industrialization in terms of changes in paid work. The transformation has been framed as one from a community of comparatively independent producers to a class of wage workers.

Jeanne Boydston

#36. Working 40 hours a week used to mean a minimum standard of living and a foothold on the first rung of the economic ladder to the middle class.

Jackie Speier

#37. Ive had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctorto develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.

Henrik Ibsen

#38. I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

Jack Gould

#39. For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.

Valerie Miner

#40. Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

Russell Baker

#41. Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.

Martin Cruz Smith

#42. I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

Cindy Sheehan

#43. My parents' parents were regular working-class people. I ended up speaking in a certain way, and one gets sidelined into doing certain parts. I think that is really quite narrow-minded.

Toby Stephens

#44. Working-class and poor women are also living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.

Rebecca Traister

#45. I'm definitely working class, and I still believe in those values. I know that losing everything would not be an unfamiliar feeling. Meaning, if you don't have it anymore, you didn't have it to begin with.

John Travolta

#46. I'm working class. Not because my family have always been skint or because I'm from the grim north, but because I am from a class of people who believe in work. In paying their way.

Ian Watson

#47. Sometimes I'll watch a movie, and it's got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn't do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.

Winona Ryder

#48. When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

Gail Collins

#49. I am extremely excited to develop and design a brand representative of my life, experiences and style. Working closely with Cherokee will help establish a worldwide presence with best-in-class retailers and category leaders.

Alessandra Ambrosio

#50. Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both.

Daniel De Leon

#51. We did phenomenally well with young people. I think we did well with working class people.

Bernie Sanders

#52. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand?

Haruki Murakami

#53. Stephen D'Evelyn, a scholar working primarily on Hildegard's Symphonia, was a teaching assistant in my 2005 course on "Hildegard and the Gospels" and a valuable discussion partner for the translations we looked at in class.

Beverly Mayne Kienzle

#54. Unlike the Tory millionaires, I live in the heart of the proud working-class community of the Bogside in Derry.

Martin McGuinness

#55. Working income is taxed at a higher rate than the non-working income

Munir Moon

#56. My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me - when my family was working-class, and we were struggling.

Richard Rodriguez

#57. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

#58. I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.

Ken Livingstone

#59. For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

Patrick J. Kennedy

#60. From opposing unfair trade deals to fighting for a fair financial system, Hillary Clinton has shown she puts working families first. She knows as president that her first job will be creating jobs for the middle class. I am proud to endorse her today because I know she will keep Ohio moving forward.

Sherrod Brown

#61. Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.

Johnny Marr

#62. New York City has become a place where it's not easy for the working class to even live.

Michael Moore

#63. I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Stephen Mangan

#64. Nonwhite and working-class women, if they are ever to identify with the organized women's movement, must see their own diverse experiences reflected in the practice and policy statements of these predominantly white middle-class groups.

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

#65. I think how veterans are treated in our country is an abomination. We don't have the draft any more, which is why so many soldiers come from working-class - rather than middle- or high-income families. Those wealthier families aren't affected, so they're not agitating for change.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#66. I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding.

Philipp Meyer

#67. To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reached out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.

Irena Klepfisz

#68. Third, it puts more small-scale capitalists out of business. They can do nothing but join the working class. 'Thus', says Marx, 'the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.

Anonymous

#69. I'm from a working-class background, and I've experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.

Annie Lennox

#70. Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Ed Miliband

#71. The healthy spirit of self-help created among working people would, more than any other measure, serve to raise them as a class; and this, not by pulling down others, but by levelling them up to a higher and still advancing standard of religion, intelligence, and virtue.

Samuel Smiles

#72. Being an MP is a good job, the sort of job all working-class parents want for their children
clean, indoors and no heavy lifting. What could be nicer?

Diane Abbott

#73. If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.

David Allan Coe

#74. It's very well known that the Republicans have problems with minorities. The Democrats have big problems with white people. Obama only got 39% of the vote. He only got 36% of the working-class white people.

Bill Maher

#75. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

George Orwell

#76. We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already ... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

Malcolm X

#77. The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

Martin Amis

#78. I am a gay man who loves James Bond films and snooker - all kinds of working-class pursuits.

Mark Gatiss

#79. Oxford is a funny place, as it is a mixture of town and gown. You have the students at the main university and at Oxford Brookes, but there is also a big working-class community.

Kevin Whately

#80. I don't think once you book a part you should stop going to class. I think you should constantly remind yourself that you're working and that you're working on getting better.

Tiffany Thornton

#81. I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.

Michelle Dockery

#82. The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women.

Sally Ride

#83. Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

Vladimir Lenin

#84. If Hillary can't win the nomination - and it's clearly very, very hard for her - she's basically a stalking horse for McCain. She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama.

Rich Lowry

#85. The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized.

Ernst Toller

#86. I enjoy a glass of wine, and I love my football. I suppose it's because I'm a real working-class.

Rod Stewart

#87. I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

Howard Fast

#88. The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief ... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

Emma Goldman

#89. Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.

Douglas Coupland

#90. I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.

Dalton Trumbo

#91. That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

George Orwell

#92. My upbringing was very straightforward suburban working class upbringing.

Billy Bragg

#93. I came from a working-class family, but I was supported by a grant system and had my fees paid, so I came out of Oxford with a debt of something like £200.

Val McDermid

#94. A Democratic president should propose a major permanent tax reduction on the middle class and working class. I suspect most of the public would find this attractive.

Robert Reich

#95. There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.

Barack Obama

#96. People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted.

Eric Drooker

#97. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said It is the trade entering his body.

Annie Dillard

#98. Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.

Peter Arshinov

#99. If an earthworm in the ground won't starve to death, then neither will we, the working class." He

Mo Yan

#100. The working class had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace.

Anthony M. Platt