Quotes About Social Class

#1. The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Gore Vidal

#2. In Europe and Australia, there is something called the Tall Poppy Syndrome: People like to cut the tall poppies. They don't want you to succeed, and they cut you down - especially people from your own social class.

Mark Burnett

#3. 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

#4. Tariffs, government contracts, naval and military spending, nationalized industries, tax policy, social welfare, the legal privileging of labor unions were among the means at the disposal of the governing class to exploit the public at large for the benefits of its various clienteles.

Ralph Raico

#5. Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.

Kavita Ramdas

#6. Peace is not just the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference.

Nelson Mandela

#7. Initially, it was about kids at the bottom rung of the social ladder, due to their looks and their class background. But they're also outsiders in terms of their peer group.

Jim McKay

#8. New York has been the subject of thousands of books. Every immigrant group has had its saga as has every epoch and social class.

Edmund White

#9. 'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Christopher Hitchens

#10. My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality.

Martin Jacques

#11. No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.

Howard Zinn

#12. In our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#13. Plague did not honor social class, and mortality among the nobility approximated that of the general population.

Robert Steven Gottfried

#14. The poor, I am told, are kind to each other but that is because they have nothing to lose,' he said. 'The rich cannot afford to be.

M.R.C. Kasasian

#15. 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

#16. We need to make fun of and ridicule the media images that seek to keep us down, divide us against each other by age, class, and race, and insist that we spend so much psychic energy on our faces, clothes and bodies that nothing is left for ideas, social change, or politics.

Susan Douglas

#17. Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.

Mao Zedong

#18. For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

Robert Pinsky

#19. In the privacy of my dreams, I'm a warrior.

Kimberly Derting

#20. Redistribution divided society into two social classes: the beneficiaries of transfer, who are calling for ever more; and the victims, who submit unwillingly. It could hardly fail to injure social peace and harmony.

Hans F. Sennholz

#21. It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold.

Oscar Wilde

#22. 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

#23. For their holidays: the rich go see the world; the poor go see their parents.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#24. HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

George Bernard Shaw

#25. A real man would have fought to be with the woman he loved - social class be damned.

Kelly Oram

#26. All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

Friedrich Engels

#27. you can't hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella

Philip Rahv

#28. From what I could see, men or women, children or adults, young or aged, rich or poor, war was making everyone equal.

Alephonsion Deng

#29. Can a woman become a genius of the first class? Nobody can know unless women in general shall have equal opportunity with men in education, in vocational choice, and in social welcome of their best intellectual work for a number of generations.

Anna Garlin Spencer

#30. There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters.

James Burnham

#31. We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

Angela Carter

#32. It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author.

Vladimir Nabokov

#33. I was in the class they made 'The Social Network' about.

Trip Adler

#34. A robust Liberian middle-class fosters the advancement of social wealth and a well-educated Liberian society.

Henry Johnson Jr

#35. An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class.

George Lakoff

#36. Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most.

Anonymous

#37. It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

Barack Obama

#38. They had supported him ... for freedom's sake, they would have said; meaning as do all men who mouth that catchword, freedom for themselves and their own class.

Margaret Butler

#39. When you hear a person say, "I hate," adding the name of some race, nation, religion, or social class, you are dealing with a belated mind. That person may dress like a modern, ride in an automobile, listen to the radio, but his or her mind is properly dated about 1000 B.C.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

#40. People gossip. People are insecure, so they talk about other people so that they won't be talked about. They point out flaws in other people to make them feel good about themselves. I think at any age or any social class, that's present.

Blake Lively

#41. I really want the audience to place close attention to the movement, possibilities of movement, possibilities of trespassing boundaries and observe what's possible in different social settings, and different settings of class designation as well.

Todd Haynes

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. This movie came as a reaction to reality. I realized that I do not know that 80 of the population that lives poor in my city. I wanted to make a social experiment putting in the same car several people from different social classes, just to see what would happen.

Jonathan Jakubowicz

#45. Depression as one example is an illness that has a chemical basis, but also is deeply embedded in cultural norms about gender, social class, race.

Jonathan Michel Metzl

#46. 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

#47. There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Judith Martin

#48. My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.

J.G. Ballard

#49. To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.

Charles Eames

#50. Liberty is an affair of laws and institutions which bring rights and duties into equilibrium. It is not at all an affair of selecting the proper class to rule.

William Graham Sumner

#51. Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war.

Sun Yat-sen

#52. Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.

Adrian McKinty

#53. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

Friedrich Engels

#54. For a slave to be taught that he should no longer lie and cheat with revolutionary; more astonishing still was the slave's discovery that he did not want to lie or cheat and that he now loved the owner whom he had once resented and feared.

John Charles Pollock

#55. Nor did she believe in identity, certainly not the local nationalistic version of it. She said that man was only smart if he was able to shed his identity.

"Skin color is a little hard to shed," she said, "it's true. But the DNA of your social class is even harder to get rid of.

Sayed Kashua

#56. 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

#57. Do you think me, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?

Charlotte Bronte

#58. Kids from small families grow about an inch taller than those from large families. This is true regardless of income and social class, because a body can't grow well while fighting off nine siblings' cold viruses.

Arianne Cohen

#59. What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

Joan Didion

#60. In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.

David Brooks

#61. The main point about civility is ... the ability to interact with strangers without holding
their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce
some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.

Zygmunt Bauman

#62. In the party of Lincoln and Reagan and much of the donor class, the defense of human life is what they think loses elections. They think we need to spend time on really popular ideas, like cutting your mom's Social Security check.

Gary Bauer

#63. Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the playthings of government.

Ron Paul

#64. No matter how irrelevant social class now is, even the most eager egalitarian must be quietly proud that the posh English rose is still an industry standard for peerlessly sophisticated beauty.

Kate Reardon

#65. Class is a stronger social adhesive than nationality.

Elly Griffiths

#66. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.

Thorstein Veblen

#67. The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.

Edith Wharton

#68. But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can give
impudence to his betters!

Hope Mirrlees

#69. At either end of the social spectrum there lies a leisure class.

Eric Jay Beck

#70. My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.

Spike Lee

#71. This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.

Leon Jouhaux

#72. Teens' use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background [boyd, danah , "An Old Fogey's Analysis of a Teenager's View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015].

Danah Boyd

#73. A social democratic party without deep roots in the working class movement would quickly fade into an unrepresentative intellectual sect.

Roy Jenkins

#74. Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion ... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.

Chuck Palahniuk

#75. 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

#76. We're attacking all accepted values. Authority, class differences, shared perceptions. We don't care what happens to our social structure -- revolutions are for suckers. Our target is people's collective consciousness. It's like throwing a cream pie in their face.

Fuminori Nakamura

#77. Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy.

Betty Smith

#78. Many philosophers, economists and social scientists saw the middle classes, as the tool to end all class division, with an end of days revolution

Owen H. Lewis

#79. Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.

Mao Zedong

#80. This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#81. In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

Susan Wiggs

#82. The issues that matter to me are the social safety nets for people, health care, middle-class concerns. We need to take care of the middle class and the poor in our country.

Tim McGraw

#83. If they had won, all they'd have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he's wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans - the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn't have permitted it." Juliana thought, Spoken like a devout Fascist.

Philip K. Dick

#84. 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

#85. I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

Cristina Kirchner

#86. It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.

Ernest Bramah

#87. There is a cost that comes with moving schools so often and it's not what I want for my son when he gets older, but it did make me very adaptable. I became aware of what was missing from the social structure of each class that I arrived in, and made sure to fill that gap.

Jennifer Ehle

#88. 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

#89. While in the course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been subjected to but slight and gradual modifications, the other portion has been largely developed in directions indicated by the interests of the dominant classes, and to the injury of the classes they oppress.

Peter Kropotkin

#90. Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.

Erik Olin Wright

#91. We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries.

Anthony Crosland

#92. The best example of all, to me, that our problems are both personal and cultural and political and social is the whole condition of the middle class economically.

William J. Clinton

#93. Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil ...

Abraham Lincoln

#94. In the course of the twenty-first century what may be called the "capital wage" could be added to the labor wage and the social wage, so that middle-class Americans - not merely an affluent minority - might derive income from three sources rather than just two.

Michael Lind

#95. I'm not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class.

Nicholas A. Christakis

#96. In a social studies class I did a paper on the history of Attica, which ended up being a little book that I created.

Paul Smith

#97. In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States.

Christopher Hitchens

#98. The higher the social class of other students the higher any given student's achievement.

James S. Coleman

#99. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.

Vladimir Lenin

#100. Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.

Kathleen Blanco