Top 100 Quotes About Social Class
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Plague did not honor social class, and mortality among the nobility approximated that of the general population.
Robert Steven Gottfried
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. A real man would have fought to be with the woman he loved - social class be damned.
Kelly Oram
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The higher the social class of other students the higher any given student's achievement.
James S. Coleman
#20. In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.
John Rawls
#21. Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.
Fidel Castro
#22. I went to Queen's - a fine university with the proudly stupidest frosh week in the country. This was, when I was there, supposed to be somehow evidence of a higher social class.
Russell Smith
#23. We were not in the same social class but at least we were at the same bed.
Marjane Satrapi
#24. 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
#25. When we speak for the poor, please note that we do not take sides with one social class. What we do is invite all social classes, rich and poor, without distinction, saying to everyone let us take seriously the cause of the poor as though it were our own.
Oscar Romero
#26. 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
#27. In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class ... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me.
Edmund White
#28. From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.
David Lindsay-Abaire
#29. My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.
James Gray
#30. And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?
Robert Sternberg
#31. The writer has a life and a personality but the problem of today is that most of those writers have exactly the same life; they belong to the same social class, the same milieu, they have the same experiences. Once you read one of those books, you have read them all. And this is a problem.
Pascal Bruckner
#32. The lady is proverbial for her skill in eluding definition ... she may be described merely as the female of the favored social class.
Emily James Smith Putnam
#33. Eating is the purest mode of consumption. Our purchases are statements about our social class, our friends, and our beliefs. Buying something as continually necessary as food is an ongoing act of self-definition.
Evan D.G. Fraser
#34. He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life.
H.W. Brands
#35. In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.
Peter Drucker
#36. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
#37. The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.
Gore Vidal
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. '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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold.
Oscar Wilde
#52. 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
#53. For their holidays: the rich go see the world; the poor go see their parents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#54. 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
#55. All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
Friedrich Engels
#56. you can't hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella
Philip Rahv
#57. From what I could see, men or women, children or adults, young or aged, rich or poor, war was making everyone equal.
Alephonsion Deng
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. I was in the class they made 'The Social Network' about.
Trip Adler
#61. A robust Liberian middle-class fosters the advancement of social wealth and a well-educated Liberian society.
Henry Johnson Jr
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
Judith Martin
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Do you think me, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?
Charlotte Bronte
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Class is a stronger social adhesive than nationality.
Elly Griffiths
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. At either end of the social spectrum there lies a leisure class.
Eric Jay Beck
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. A social democratic party without deep roots in the working class movement would quickly fade into an unrepresentative intellectual sect.
Roy Jenkins
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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