Quotes About Middle Class Life

#1. To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life.

Susan T. Fiske

#2. It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.

J.G. Ballard

#3. The golden years become lower-middle-class life revisited. That's a bittersweet ending.

Timothy Ferriss

#4. I want people to know that movie stars live a normal, middle-class life.

Shah Rukh Khan

#5. It is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. Except, of course, in middle-class life. But then the middle classes are not modern.

Oscar Wilde

#6. I've had people ask me in interviews what it's like to have money, but that's not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.

Beth Ditto

#7. 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

#8. 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.

#9. I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31. I didn't sleep on people's couches.

John Lithgow

#10. Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.

J.G. Ballard

#11. As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them, see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape
fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life.

Barry B. Longyear

#12. To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

Louise Erdrich

#13. I was fed up with the situation I found myself in in the 1960s. I didn't like being a barrister's wife and going out to dinner with other professional people and dealing with middle class life. It seemed claustrophobic.

Caryl Churchill

#14. Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

Derek Raymond

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

Jarvis Cocker

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Mohamed ElBaradei

#19. 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

#20. This opportunity - to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life - it isn't bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business.

Marco Rubio

#21. For the better part of my life, I was always trying to manufacture somehow what I would consider 'living.' Because I grew up sort of upper-middle class and I didn't relate so much to that as a life, and I wanted to really find 'living.'

Alex Ebert

#22. We need for America to get back to basics and focus on the middle class's quality of life. Healthcare reform is vital to restoring that standard of living.

Sander Levin

#23. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.

Sherwood Anderson

#24. A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the 'luxuries' which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.

Anthony Crosland

#25. I'm a nice middle-class girl in real life, and I'm a mom and a grandma, and I usually play sweet characters.

Jacki Weaver

#26. I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

Eve Ensler

#27. 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

#28. The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Salman Rushdie

#29. As you will be aware, gentlemen, I have made it my life's work to entertain the working classes, enrage the middle classes, and fascinate the aristocracy - but I do believe I've just met my match. Accrington 'Arry here is in a class of his own, beyond my reach.

Gyles Brandreth

#30. It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life - for all its material good fortune - has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.

Sebastian Junger

#31. I observed all the students at IIT. They came from all parts of India, toppers in their respective schools. Few had come there to research science or learn about technology. Most had come to achieve their middle-class dream - a better life. And that is what the IITs promised them.

Chetan Bhagat

#32. She was not granted the luxury of forgetting her lower middle-class existence where life hangs by an unseen thread to every hope and where every slash of disappointment shrinks the life further.

Madhu Vajpayee

#33. Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.

Arabella Weir

#34. The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Orson Welles

#35. I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

Gertrude Stein

#36. We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.

Richard Corliss

#37. Our goal is to upgrade the life of China's middle class. We all want to live better.

Guo Guangchang

#38. The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.

Nelson Algren

#39. The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

Amiri Baraka

#40. His eye fell upon the aspidistra. Two years he had inhabited this vile room; two mortal years in which nothing had been accomplished.

George Orwell

#41. The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people
life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.

D.H. Lawrence

#42. In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

John N. Gray

#43. It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.

Colum McCann

#44. 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

#45. They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they actually were.

E. M. Forster

#46. Happiness? But that is so middle-class. What is happiness? There are so many things in life so much more important than happiness.

Ayn Rand

#47. Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.

Matthew Arnold

#48. One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

Orhan Pamuk

#49. Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories-wise, compassionate and haunting.

Dan Chaon

#50. I spent nearly two decades as a social worker and an educator with kids. So, my whole life has been about helping middle-class families. So it's just kind of a hollow argument to say I'm not a family person.

Kyrsten Sinema

#51. This is the whistle-stop memoir of how a lower-middle-class girl from the north of England one day changed the way she lived her life and set off on a bumpy path that ultimately led her to her own slice of the happily-ever-after pie.

Tillie Cole

#52. Our focus going forward is on sectors where the life of China's middle class can be upgraded: health, travel, leisure, education, and the Internet. We call it marrying China's growth with global resources.

Guo Guangchang

#53. In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

Stephen Carter

#54. I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

John Cheever

#55. And let me make this very clear - unlike President Obama, I will not raise taxes on the middle class. As president, I will protect the sanctity of life. I will honor the institution of marriage. And I will guarantee America's first liberty: the freedom of religion.

Mitt Romney

#56. His experience of life in an office had made him determine never to have anything more to do with one ...

W. Somerset Maugham

#57. Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis
German National Socialism.

Hermann Goring

#58. I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be ... but God clearly says, those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.

John Green

#59. I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.

Dennis Hopper

#60. It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home.

Isabella Bird