Quotes About Middle Class

#1. You know, you cut taxes for the rich sometimes and it sits in a bank account. You cut taxes for the middle class, they will spend the money.

Andrew Cuomo

#2. Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider

Sandra Scarr

#3. The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

Louise Bogan

#4. Ten years ago I said, you know, my goal is to be able to get food on the table. What I'm trying to say by that is trying to create a vibrant, capable and effective middle class. The quicker and stronger that we can be able to do this, the easier it is for political reform to move forward.

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#5. I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

Poe Ballantine

#6. We are the ones looking out for the middle class. Who do think pays for the endless expansion of government? Its middle class taxpayers. Our reforms protect middle class taxpayers.

Scott Walker

#7. I'm a warrior for the middle class.

Barack Obama

#8. I basically believe that until China stop stealing our intellectual property, and until they stop keeping our companies out that do good things, the amount we will gain from export jobs is minimized, and the amount we lose in middle class incomes is maximized.

Charles Schumer

#9. This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God.

Paul Tillich

#10. We've always been in favor of improved wages for workers. When you have a strong middle class, they want to buy more stuff at Costco.

James Sinegal

#11. Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#12. Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

Aravind Adiga

#13. 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

#14. The future and the hope for the middle class church lies in the renewal of its lifeblood, which is only possible if the church succeeds in winning the working class.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#15. We will lower the tax burden on middle class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share. Middle class taxpayers will have a choice between a children's tax credit or a significant reduction in their income tax rate.

William J. Clinton

#16. No state will be well administered unless the middle class holds sway.

Aristotle.

#17. 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

#18. Set politics and party aside: If it's not right for Michigan's small businesses and middle class, it's never been right with me.

Gary Peters

#19. Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.

Barack Obama

#20. I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the ... Medicaid bill.

Henry Hyde

#21. 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

#22. With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

Adrian McKinty

#23. We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

Noam Chomsky

#24. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

George Bernard Shaw

#25. I may, and I think I represent a tradition that means a lot to me, which has really always been about fighting for others, for middle-class families, for working class - for working people, you know, and that's a tradition and a commitment that I take very seriously.

Caroline Kennedy

#26. The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa.

Rory Stewart

#27. I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.

Mohamed ElBaradei

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

Hillary Clinton

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

Liane Moriarty

#30. Here in Indiana and in many states throughout the union, we rely on coal to power our homes and provide good-paying middle class jobs - like the one my family relied on when I was a kid. The coal mine helped put food on our table and helped me pursue an education and realize the American Dream.

Larry Bucshon

#31. If you think that someone is out to steal everything you have, you're either paranoid or a member of the middle class.

Robert Breault

#32. The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Tracey Ullman

#33. Inside each of you is a rich person, a poor person & a middle class person. It is up to you to decide which person you become.

Robert Kiyosaki

#34. Poor people and most of the middle class are not willing to be uncomfortable. Remember, being comfortable is their biggest priority in life ... The only time you can actually grow is when you are outside your comfort zone.

T. Harv Eker

#35. I was very much an only child who was raised by the television and movies, and I grew up in New York. We weren't, like, rich people, but we were middle-class people and my parents supported this love I had for entertainment.

Billy Eichner

#36. Why is this government so insensitive to the concerns of the middle-class people?

Gilles Duceppe

#37. If a budget is designed to show our values, it's clear where the majority stands: against opportunity, against education, and against America's hard-working, tax-paying middle class.

Ellen Tauscher

#38. Thinking ahead, what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones.

Robert Menzies

#39. Taxes," said rich dad. "You're taxed when you earn. You're taxed when you spend. You're taxed when you save. You're taxed when you die." "Why do people let the government do that to them?" "The rich don't," said rich dad with a smile. "The poor and the middle class do.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#40. The rise of the global middle class will pave the way for a new golden age in Australian society.

Asher Judah

#41. Right now, America's middle class is struggling to meet their basic needs.

Ruben Hinojosa

#42. The controversies between the proletariat and the middle class had to be smoothed out and bridged over by each getting to know and understand the other.

Fritz Sauckel

#43. I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up.

John Lennon

#44. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

Angela Davis

#45. This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

Susan George

#46. The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I'm from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes.

Matt Damon

#47. I love my cross-sectioned, cross-cultural audience. Some of them are doing better than the average guy, but my audience has always been people who are struggling to stay in the middle class.

Tavis Smiley

#48. A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush's shovel.

Rahm Emanuel

#49. There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

Bernie Sanders

#50. Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons.

Yulia Tymoshenko

#51. In Caribbean there is no middle class: you're either rich or you're poor. And the ladder to success is not really a ladder, it's a chain; once you reach a certain level, you can't go back and you can only keep going forward.

Zoe Saldana

#52. 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

#53. That everybody can do something, without regard to how old or young they are, rich or poor or middle class they are, how busy or not busy they are and what level skills they have. Everyone can do something. And everybody should do something ... And if you do it, you'll be happier.

William J. Clinton

#54. Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.

Mira Nair

#55. Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.

Neal Stephenson

#56. Technology can be a great equalizer when it comes to health care, education - to the point where rich, poor, middle class can all get the same benefits.

Jeff Greene

#57. Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.

John Shelton Reed

#58. There is plenty of ambitious competition and hypocrisy in the middle class, which makes it a rather fertile environment for a writer.

J.K. Rowling

#59. I came from Nebraska, a very middle class family with a progressive father.

Theodore C. Sorensen

#60. From the day he first walked through the door of the Oval Office, President Obama's top priority has been growing our economy, creating good jobs, and rebuilding middle class security.

Denis McDonough

#61. The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

Timothy Noah

#62. I'm not for the sort of trade deals that hollow out our standards while they hollow out our middle class and middle class wages.

Martin O'Malley

#63. I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.

Jeffrey Gitomer

#64. He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

Michael Lewis

#65. For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

Howard Nemerov

#66. There's no conscious plan here; my whole life in politics as a state legislator and in Congress has been about strengthening the middle class.

Peter Welch

#67. The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative.

Noah Feldman

#68. Even the ways we don't eat are based in class. The middle class don't eat in support groups. The poor can't afford not to eat at all. The rich hire someone to not eat with them in private.

Sallie Tisdale

#69. I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point.

Anne Hathaway

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. I think the president can set a tone and say we're not divided by gender, age, race. We're all Americans and want the same things. We want the best things for our kids. We want the rules to be fair. If they work hard, get a great education, they should be able to join the middle class.

Bobby Jindal

#74. My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

Denise Mina

#75. I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.

Richard Rodriguez

#76. The solid, middle-class values of hard work, responsibility, family, community, and faith my father talked about tirelessly from Iowa to New York, he lived at home. The hopes he had for his family and for me, he had for all Americans. I think Americans understood this.

Chelsea Clinton

#77. In my generation, except for a few people who'd gone into banking or nursing or something like that, middle-class women didn't have careers. You were to marry and have children and be a nice mother. You didn't go out and do anything. I found that I got restless.

Julia Child

#78. The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules.

Arianna Huffington

#79. Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.

Matt Taibbi

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

Nina Easton

#81. In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.

Mitch Daniels

#82. I strongly support tax relief for the middle class.

Rick Larsen

#83. Middle class jobs prevent crime and violence.

Michael Moore

#84. We are committing ourselves to basic protections of our people ... We will not permit banks to repossess the homes of working class and middle class people. That's the end of that, it is not negotiable.

Alexis Tsipras

#85. Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

Andy Stern

#86. I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Gore Vidal

#87. When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.

David Mitchell

#88. There isn't much I find interesting to write about in middle-class life.

Jarvis Cocker

#89. I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It's not what we do here in America. I don't think there's anything called 'middle class values' that are different from the values of other people in this country.

Jon Kyl

#90. Progressive policies implemented since the early 1900s launched America into the modern age and created a vibrant middle class.

Keith Ellison

#91. My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

Dorothy Allison

#92. I would speculate that a critical mass of the population has to internalize a middle class outlook first. International aid experience has demonstrated many times that just building railroads doesn't get you there. You need people ready to sue them.

Charles R. Morris

#93. The truth is that beginning in the 1970s, the heart of our Democratic party, America's strong striving middle class, began drifting away from us.

Mario Cuomo

#94. I've been on my grandfather's boat, Calypso, twice in my life. My mother raised me in a pretty typical middle-class life.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#95. Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.

Naomi Klein

#96. The most pro-business thing you can do is to help middle-class people thrive.

Nick Hanauer

#97. Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones.

Paul Beatty

#98. Putting middle class families in jeopardy in order to protect the wealthiest among us isn't consistent with the values and priorities that most Americans share.

Martin O'Malley

#99. Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.

James S. Coleman

#100. Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.

Christopher Lasch