Quotes About The Middle Class

#1. 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

#2. Witnessing Panama's overnight transition from banana republic to middle-class retirement haven is like watching the Univision version of Extreme Makeover: it feels so tacky but you can't change channels because you just have to find out what happens next.

Andrew Evans

#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. I know this kind of girl," Grace was saying. "It's the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven.

Gary Shteyngart

#5. In progressive, middle-class circles these days, there's the overwhelming sense that procuring and cooking freshest, healthiest, most sustainably sourced food should be a top priority for any thinking person.

Emily Matchar

#6. I like the idea of accessibility, coming from a lower-middle-class background myself, I feel like beauty and products should be accessible to all women over the world.

Diane Kruger

#7. To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.

Christian Morgenstern

#8. If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

Lewis H. Lapham

#9. The bankruptcy wars changed me forever. Even before this grinding battle, I had begun to understand the terrible squeeze on the middle class. But it was this fight that showed me how badly the playing field was tilted and taught me that the squeeze wasn't accidental.

Elizabeth Warren

#10. What has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.

Dale Spender

#11. For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality.

Nancy Pelosi

#12. Young people deserve stable employment opportunities and not mountains of debt. When young people can access the middle class, America is strengthened.

Patrick Murphy

#13. The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

Brian Grazer

#14. My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman.

James Costos

#15. The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#16. USDA is committed to keeping pace with the needs and progress of American agriculture by supporting new markets and movements that will keep farmers profitable and help create middle class jobs across the country.

Tom Vilsack

#17. Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

Arianna Huffington

#18. I cannot take away the fact I am a small-town boy from India, from a lower-middle class family, and was actually standing in front of De Niro - not on an equal level, but as an actor, on the same pedestal.

Anupam Kher

#19. Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

Henry Louis Gates

#20. The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.

John Mortimer

#21. I am not alone in thinking that we are at a tipping point ecologically and morally and politically. Democracy cannot survive without a vibrant middle class, yet the policies of one of the parties has been committed to wiping it out for 30 years.

Deborah Kass

#22. The upper middle-class cracker neighborhood ignored me, focused instead on its own pockets of human chaos. Four

Bobby Adair

#23. Anyone who has followed the U.S. economy in recent years can tell you while corporate America and their wealthy executives have recovered from the last recession, middle-class families have not. About 95 percent of income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top one percent.

James P. Hoffa

#24. Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

Graham Greene

#25. Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Ed Miliband

#26. The overtime threshold is to the middle class as the minimum wage is to low-wage workers.

Nick Hanauer

#27. Wealthy people are often criticized for being obsessed with money, but the truth is, it's the poor, working, and middle class that spend the most time thinking about it.

Steve Siebold

#28. The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

Sinclair Lewis

#29. My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.

Rashid Johnson

#30. I want to lower taxes for the middle class.

Donald Trump

#31. I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#32. I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth.

George W. Bush

#33. Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here's what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

Joe Biden

#34. I think it may be even a bigger story than the internet. You know, it's like saying, 'how big a deal is the internet?' The Chinese middle-class is going to change the world.

James Packer

#35. A normal adolescent is so restless and twitchy and awkward that he can mange to injure his knee
not playing soccer, not playing football
but by falling off his chair in the middle of French class.

Judith Viorst

#36. Wall Street shouldn't be deregulated. I think Wall Street and Main Street need to play by the same set of rules. The middle-class can't carry the burden any longer, that is what happened in the last decade. They had to bail out Wall Street.

Stephanie Cutter

#37. By making college more affordable for all and more accessible for minority students, the first new higher education authorizing legislation in a decade will help strengthen our nation and America's middle class, and spur a new age of innovation and ingenuity in our country.

Nancy Pelosi

#38. We all have a role to play - the President, Congress, parents, students and schools - in making college affordable and keeping the middle class dream alive.

Arne Duncan

#39. Educational opportunities have supported the rise of the African middle class, the professional cadre of young people who are now willing and able to contribute to Africa's future prosperity.

Mo Ibrahim

#40. Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

Elizabeth Warren

#41. If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it's really finished as a force for grappling with the world.

J.M. Ledgard

#42. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are.

Nick Hornby

#43. I had a happy, dramafree youth, growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. The only thing that was slightly unusual compared to most of my friends was that I was an only child ... I don't think that's why my parents gave me a dummy, at least they've never copped to it.

Jeff Dunham

#44. The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

Henry Louis Gates

#45. Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.

James Altucher

#46. We have a new joke on the reservation: 'What is cultural deprivation?' Answer: 'Being an upper-middle class white kid living in a split-level suburban home with a color TV.'

John Fire Lame Deer

#47. Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

Eli Broad

#48. Latinos are concerned about the same pocketbook issues that matter to most middle class Americans - creating good-paying jobs in this country, making sure our children get a quality education, and ensuring that our families have access to affordable and quality healthcare.

Linda Sanchez

#49. When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there's what's called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight.

Richard Benjamin

#50. Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

Timothy Noah

#51. Empowering women in the workforce is a key to growing the economy and having a thriving middle class.

Kirsten Gillibrand

#52. That's how the Germans are ... The aristocrats at the top hard as glass, cold as ice, servants of the King, the working masses willing, pliable, sentimental, susceptible to brutality, the middle class educated and cowardly to the point of servility.

Alfred Doblin

#53. The formula for achieving middle-class success is simple: Finish high school; don't have a child before the age of 20; and get married before having the child.

Larry Elder

#54. The Americans invaded a country without understanding what eight years of a war with Iran had meant, how that traumatized Iraq. They didn't appreciate what they support for a decade of sanctions in Iraq had done to Iraq and the bitterness that it created and that it wiped out the middle class.

Anthony Shadid

#55. We cannot get serious about helping the private sector create quality jobs without focusing first on the main drivers of our economy - the American middle class and those struggling to enter it.

Paul Tonko

#56. The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.

George Orwell

#57. In my experience, there are plenty of bad middle-class parents: those who put their own lives and careers before those of their children and make precious little time available for their offspring, preferring instead to hire in childcare and shower them with the latest and most expensive gadgets.

Martin Jacques

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. Africa is not for the weak-hearted: infrastructure issues are there. The middle class is absent in most of the countries. We have to cater to the low end of the market to grow.

Sunil Mittal

#61. We're now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work

James Fallows

#62. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Daniel Day-Lewis

#63. This ought to be a season for cooperation in terms of pushing our economy forward, job creation, steadying the middle class, and laying the groundwork for a better future. And that's what we want to work on with Republicans and Democrats.

David Axelrod

#64. As the middle class is predated upon with an ever greater malicious intensity, their children stand to lose more and harder than their parents ever did.

Henry Rollins

#65. 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

#66. You know, this idea of going around the world imposing democracy by growing a middle-class, a trading merchant class that is independent of your faith, is a good notion, but we're all partially different - it's no good imposing systems on people that it doesn't suit.

Damian Lewis

#67. The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had, and it doesn't cost the government a dime.

Andy Stern

#68. 'Fowl Space' was a lovechild of boredom. While in class, two of the developers started passing designs back and forth. Somewhere in the middle of all that ink and crumpled paper, a chicken in a space helmet was born and thus we have 'Fowl Space.'

Rob Manuel

#69. Remember, America's greatness is based on creating wealth like the rest of the world has never known, and then, making sure it's shared throughout a middle class and even the underprivileged.

Darrell Issa

#70. 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

#71. Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

Simon Mainwaring

#72. Rural Americans want leaders who help middle-class communities to plan and prosper over the long-term - not opportunists who reap the rewards for themselves, leaving nothing for the people who do the sowing.

Tom Vilsack

#73. Once Michigan stood proud. In addition to GM, Ford and Chrysler, it was home base for the United Auto Workers, a powerful escalator transporting hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers into America's middle class.

Kevin O'Leary

#74. I think how veterans are treated in our country is an abomination. We don't have the draft any more, which is why so many soldiers come from working-class - rather than middle- or high-income families. Those wealthier families aren't affected, so they're not agitating for change.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#75. 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

#76. Our middle class majority, deeply in personal debt, elects political leaders who increase our benefits. Then we vote them out because we dislike the soaring national debt.

Oliver DeMille

#77. 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

#78. I do believe that we should substantially lower student debt in this country, which is crushing millions of people. We pay for it, in my view, by a tax on Wall Street speculation. The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need. Now, it is Wall Street's time to help the middle class.

Bernie Sanders

#79. I never want to be too mean with my songs, but with 'I Hope It Rains' it was definitely somewhere in the middle with being sassy but also a little class in there as well. It was a good blend for me and who I want to be perceived as an artist.

Jana Kramer

#80. The rich did not care who ruled, as long as they were allowed to be rich. The poor could not afford to care and nobody asked their opinion in any case. Only the middle class mattered and any half-witted ruler knows how to pamper them.

Anand Neelakantan

#81. Urban residents, most of them middle class, have a much better sense of their environmental rights, and they're willing to take to the streets.

Ma Jun

#82. Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy - so utterly without a sense of humor?

Katherine Mansfield

#83. 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

#84. Urban development initiatives must match the aspirations of the middle class and the neo middle class.

Narendra Modi

#85. Middle-class kids get to play, develop their thinking ability. Poor kids are much more likely to get regimentation under the guise of socialization. On top of it, we have huge segregation in early childhood programs. I don't see these patterns changing anytime soon, and that's a big obstacle.

Pedro Noguera

#86. Rachel bit her lip. I hope you're right. I'm a little worried. What if someone asks what's on the next math test and I start spouting a prophecy in the middle of geometry class? The Pythagorean theorem shall be problem two ... Gods, that would be embarrassing.

Rick Riordan

#87. 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

#88. One thing we're going to focus on is the middle class and the crushing prices and stagnant wages they're facing. What motivates me is looking at my 3-year-old son and thinking about what we're passing on to him and his future wife and their future kids.

Bobby Schilling

#89. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.

Warren Buffett

#90. 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

#91. The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm

Kurt Vonnegut

#92. Such an assemblage of the spraddle-legged men of the middle class, whose hands were bent and shoulders stooped from delving and constructing, had never appeared to an Asbury Park summer crowd, and the latter was vaguely amused.

Stephen Crane

#93. the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren't, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.

Charles Murray

#94. I am invariably and have been since adolescence inimical to the Republican mind which shows at the most inflated size the bad qualities of the bourgeoisie rather than the good qualities of the middle class which the Democrats call forth.

Janet Flanner

#95. No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.

Robert Reich

#96. Part of the middle class promise is that, after a lifetime of hard work, you'll be able to retire and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Medicare was established to secure that promise.

Al Franken

#97. Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.

Christina Stead

#98. I was born into a middle class family in New Jersey. My dad came home from serving in the Army after having lost his father, worked in the Breyers ice cream plant in Newark, New Jersey. Was the first person to graduate from college.

Chris Christie

#99. The idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers - that's an old idea that's failed every time it's been tried.

Marco Rubio

#100. It is also very important to observe, that menial servants are absolutely necessary to make the resources of the higher and middle classes of society efficient in the demand for material products.

Thomas Malthus