Quotes About Economic Class

#1. I don't think we should stop emphasizing race because I think, you know, race is still very, very important, and we have to recognize that and continue to introduce programs to address racial inequities. But we have to widen our vision and also address the growing problems of economic class.

William Julius Wilson

#2. If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

James Gray

#3. People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.

Lynne Tillman

#4. When I go to a great movie, I can live somebody else's life a little bit for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

Roger Ebert

#5. I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.

James Gray

#6. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level ... A writer is someone who writes.

Pat Schneider

#7. A day of peace and sharing can lead to greater understanding and cooperation among political parties, faith groups, and people of different races and economic class.

John Conyers

#8. Every child needs nature. Not just the ones with parents who appreciate nature. Not only those of a certain economic class or culture or set of abilities. Every child.

Richard Louv

#9. We libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.

Murray Rothbard

#10. NAZISM = "National Socialism"
BOLSHEVISM = "International Socialism"
One was collectivism based on economic class, the other collectivism based on race and ethnicity. They agreed on the socialist part, but disagreed on participants.

A.E. Samaan

#11. For most of the 20th century, we didn't just enjoy economic success in Michigan, we defined it. Our innovators and entrepreneurs created the world's most productive companies, and our unions made sure that productivity led to broad middle class prosperity.

Jennifer Granholm

#12. Indian middle class is economic entity, not a political entity.

Vivek Kumar Singh

#13. The Economic Problem ... the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle.

John Maynard Keynes

#14. If you have an economic system in which there must be a lower class, there must be unemployed. There must be a large pool of people working at the worst jobs and the lowest paid jobs. Once you have a system like that, then the most likely people to be victims of that are people of color.

Howard Zinn

#15. Are we prepared to take on the enormous political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?

Bernie Sanders

#16. 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

#17. The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.

Doug Aitken

#18. Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.

Elizabeth Warren

#19. The centerpiece of Obamanomics - raising taxes on high earners and investors and lowering them on the middle class - is attacked by free-marketers for penalizing economic success and possibly further stalling economic growth.

Nina Easton

#20. The future economic success of Silicon Valley will be contingent on whether we have a good quality of life. World-class workers will only want to come to a world-class living environment.

Carl Guardino

#21. Whether it's social class status or your economic status, it is very evident that the top, if they get their way, will survive and be strong. They will lead those who are helpless, in many ways, to suffer.

Edwin Hodge

#22. 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

#23. The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over and we are headed for the power-law distribution of economic opportunities. Education per se is not going to make up the difference.

Erik Brynjolfsson

#24. Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

Nina Easton

#25. We have reached a profound point in economic history where the truth is unpalatable to the political class - and that truth is that the scale and magnitude of the problem is larger than their ability to respond - and it terrifies them.

Hugh Hendry

#26. I want to make it very clear that this middle-class tax cut, in my view, is central to any attempt we're going to make to have a short-term economic strategy and a long-term fairness strategy, which is part of getting this country going again.

William J. Clinton

#27. We need a positive economic agenda that invests in the innovation and growth that will create jobs for middle class families and ensure that America remains the world leader.

Rick Larsen

#28. To fulfill the promise of economic opportunity, we must remain true to the principle that collective bargaining is a cornerstone of a free society and indispensable to a strong middle class.

Thomas Perez

#29. Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.

Irving Fisher

#30. Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.

Tony Benn

#31. Economic progress and better education have directly resulted in the birth of a class of voters who are better informed, very demanding and highly critical.

Najib Razak

#32. 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

#33. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'.

Emma Goldman

#34. Economic theology is the opiate of the middle classes.

Thurman Arnold

#35. Emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, i.e., from organizations of production in which the conditions of work are determined by a master class who own the means of production, and in which the fruits of work are alienated from workers to the benefit of masters.

Mortimer Adler

#36. Our object is the economic freedom of the producing classes; this ultimate goal will be attained after a long and bitter struggle; therefore, our primary task is to organize the masses and lead them in the struggle for economic freedom.

M. N. Roy

#37. Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.

Richard Florida

#38. It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth - a rising, thriving middle class.

Barack Obama

#39. The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that's not their concern.

Noam Chomsky

#40. A stronger middle class is not the consequence of economic growth. A stronger middle class is the cause of economic growth.

Martin O'Malley

#41. A populist is someone who fights for common sense economic policies that sustain and expand the middle class.

Bruce Braley

#42. 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

#43. Books were not looked upon as things unobtainable due to economic circumstances or class status. My grandfather stole an entire set of Dicken's from the local library.

Bob Hartley

#44. The explosive growth in places like Shanghai has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into a thriving new middle class. What China has done is nothing short of an economic transformation, and the citizens of this country have every right to be proud.

Gary Locke

#45. Driving with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake is likely to get you nowhere, but certainly will burn out vital parts of your car. Similarly, cutting taxes on the middle class, but increasing them on the 'rich' is likely to result in an economic burnout.

Terry Savage

#46. The leisure class is one in which individuals have sufficient economic security and sufficient leisure to find opportunity for a variety of satisfactions in life.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#47. Our society buries most of those that contribute above their station. It disbelieves them, labelling them whatever nickname will soil their reputation the most at the time. That's the standard protocol for political and economic warfare.

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#48. Cities with a black middle class provide the narrow minded an opportunity to realize that cultural differences are largely economic.

Dov Davidoff

#49. When it comes to America's economy, the truth is that Mitt Romney believes that the key to our country's economic future lies in the failed policies of the past, the same ones that put banks before people, Wall Street before Main Street, plunging us into recession and devastating the middle class.

Charlie Gonzalez

#50. That's what healthcare reform is about: the middle class's economic security.

Sander Levin

#51. The more I support with my economic plans the building of a middle class, the quicker they're going to turn around and say, 'Hey, we want a bigger say in things.' So, I knew what I was getting into right at the beginning. It's the right thing to do.

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#52. As Ohio's working families continue to recover from the worst economic recession in our country's history, we need a president who's committed to growing our economy by lifting up the middle class.

Sherrod Brown

#53. The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.

Eugene V. Debs

#54. Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.

Thomas Frank

#55. I have a lot of sympathy with the ideas and frustration of the Occupy movement. I absolutely agree with the sense that Wall Street has brought an economic calamity to the middle class and that no one has been held accountable.

Susan Bysiewicz

#56. As an explanation tool, the concept of class serves, first and foremost, to clarify who gains and who losses from specific economic processes and policies and with what consequences.

Alejandro Portes

#57. Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords.

Margaret MacMillan

#58. 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

#59. We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.

Karl Barth

#60. World class communities come in all shapes and sizes, they are not determined by geography, and/or natural resources so much as by the mindset of their local leadership.

Don A. Holbrook

#61. The president's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars.

Mitch Daniels

#62. There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

Robert Heilbroner

#63. Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class.

Jon Meacham

#64. Look, John's last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs.

Joe Biden

#65. By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract, ... governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.

John Maynard Keynes

#66. Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

F. Sionil Jose

#67. When journalists and politicians speak of a dwindling middle class that's under economic assault and a poor community that's getting bigger, they're talking about Ferguson. Independent of the racial demographics and dynamics of Ferguson, Missouri, there's a 'Ferguson' near you.

Jesse Jackson

#68. There is no economic necessity for continuing the arms race after the World War, even from the standpoint of the capitalist class itself, with the exception of at most certain armaments interests.

Anonymous

#69. The majority decision constitutionalizes a distinction between a red leather pouch and a paper bag that is necessarily based at least in some part on economic and class differences and perceptions.

David L. Bazelon

#70. Beneath the surface, unnoticed by many, an even deeper force was at work - the rise of creativity as a fundamental economic driver, and the rise of a new social class, the Creative Class.

Richard Florida

#71. As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.

Christina Romer

#72. 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

#73. Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.

Manmohan Singh

#74. Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class.

Bernie Sanders

#75. Real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage.

Suzanne La Follette

#76. In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.

Nick Clooney

#77. In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

Angela Davis

#78. The Fed's low-interest policy not only encourages spending and borrowing, it discourages the one thing that best helps people raise themselves into higher economic classes - saving.

Mark Thornton

#79. The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance.

Ellen Cushing

#80. We choose forward. We choose inclusion. We choose growing together. We choose American economic might and muscle, standing strong on the bedrock of the American ideal: a strong, empowered and ever-growing middle class.

Cory Booker

#81. The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

#82. The biggest roadblock to middle-class economic advancement is that governments confiscate more than a third of all family income. Each year the average American taxpayer works 127 days - from January 1 until May 7 - just to pay taxes.

Thomas DiLorenzo

#83. The Social-Democratic Federation took part in all the political and economic struggles of the English working class; it took pains to bring Socialist views home to them, not only through agitation and propaganda, but also by actions.

Karl Radek

#84. The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious.

Robert Menzies

#85. There's a wider agenda that speaks to what the Democratic Party has historically stood for, which are economic rights for those who are struggling in the middle class, concern for the poor, for economic justice for those who are marginalized in our society.

Mike McCurry

#86. Today's tax cuts provide yet another illustration of the Republicans' fiscally irresponsible economic policies that ignore the needs of America's middle class, students, and working families.

Ellen Tauscher

#87. Prior to 1940, the affluent and the middle class began to converge, but after 1979, the economic gap between the middle class and affluent widened significantly.

William Julius Wilson

#88. Having won re-election convincingly and against the economic odds, President Obama quickly made good on his promise of maintaining taxes as they are for the middle class while raising them on the wealthiest Americans.

Kevin O'Leary

#89. In Philadelphia, our public safety, poverty reduction, health and economic development all start with education. We can't grow the middle class if we don't give our kids the tools they need to innovate and invent.

Michael Nutter

#90. I put forward a budget of what I called "middle-class economics" that continues to be fiscally prudent but makes necessary investments for us to continue the economic momentum and job growth.

Barack Obama

#91. I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time.

Randall Robinson

#92. What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.

Meghan Daum

#93. Don't liberal Democrats ever learn economic principles, or does their class warfare trump all else?

Cal Thomas

#94. Are we interested in treating the symptoms of poverty and economic stagnation through income redistribution and class warfare, or do we want to go at the root causes of poverty and economic stagnation by promoting pro-growth policies that promote prosperity?

Paul Ryan

#95. The Populist Caucus is the only caucus in Congress devoted solely to addressing middle class economic issues. We formed the caucus because the founding members felt like there wasn't enough focus on middle class issues in Washington, and we're going to keep it focused on middle class issues.

Bruce Braley

#96. To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you'll need in the society of the future.

Thomas Frank

#97. Ensconced, he (Roosevelt) lacked some of the neuroses of progressives-economic envy and race hatred especially.His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency.

Edmund Morris

#98. It's a class war, and a war on young people too ... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.

Noam Chomsky

#99. It is a function of entrenched, intergenerational poverty that isolates too many lower-income Americans from even middle-class economic, cultural, and social opportunities and norms.

Yuval Levin