Underclass Quotes

#1. Smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There'd be a permanent underclass of stupid people.

Adelle Waldman

#2. The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes.

Richard Corliss

#3. We have a large underclass in Britain, and a fairly low standard of education. Our best universities are extremely good, but a very significant proportion of the British population that comes out of compulsory schooling with very low standards of education.

Nigel Short

#4. Zionists believe they are entitled by God to the land, groves and homes of the non-Jewish underclass. They quote the Bible as the reference that 'God gave them the land.' The size of the alleged God-given land has never been determined and Israel's borders still remain fuzzy.

Lee Whitnum

#5. Corporate welfare, I think, is a disaster for this country. It's crippling our economy. It is contributing to a permanent underclass and corrupting the business community.

Charles Koch

#6. He was known to Ankh-Morpork's professional underclass as a thoughtful, patient man, and considered something of an intellectual because some of his tattoos were spelled right.

Terry Pratchett

#7. In the current world, with the skills needed, dropouts [like no secondary education] are condemned to being members of the underclass. In my view, this is a fault of the American school system, which is a government monopoly.

Milton Friedman

#8. Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And

Orson Scott Card

#9. When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.

Linda Chavez

#10. Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

Charles Kuralt

#11. This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

Zygmunt Bauman

#12. The taxpayer is the new permanent underclass.

Andrew Wilkow

#13. Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.

Anthony Daniels

#14. [Some] Americans are generally incapable of perceiving class differences among blacks and are quick to ascribe antisocial underclass behavior to all African Americans.

Leon Dash

#15. Partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path, and we need only look at France and Germany to see how unwise it is to create a permanent underclass.

Zoe Lofgren

#16. The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid - and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they're an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer.

Peter Mullan

#17. Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.

Kate Millett

#18. Remember that our Spanish conquerors, for their own benefit, deliberately created an oppressed underclass whose collective psyche became rooted in passivity and underachievement.

Lionel Sosa

#19. It's been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.

John Hodgman

#20. I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.

William Gibson

#21. What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

August Strindberg

#22. Y'cannae see can ye? Y'know who christened you lot the 'underclass'? The same sinister bastards that changed Windscale to Sellafield...they're nuthin' but a lot of jumped-up fascist bastards!

Ian Pattison

#23. Liberals talk about the 'income inequality' and the 'unfairness' and the disparity of the haves and the have-nots in New York City. Who has been running that city for all this time? Who has created the underclass in this country? It's the Democrat Party.

Rush Limbaugh

#24. It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.

Henry Louis Gates

#25. A sort of moral blackmail is exerted from both poles. The underclass, one gathers, should be dulled with charity and welfare provision lest it turn nasty. The upper class must likewise be conciliated by vast handouts, lest it lose the "incentive" to go on generating wealth.

Christopher Hitchens

#26. Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

Eric Liu

#27. Shopping and buying and getting and having comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing.

George Carlin

#28. If you belong to the underclass, you are already guilty.

Mason Cooley

#29. Freed slaves were not given land, however, and formed a new urban underclass, often moving to the favelas, slum areas that are still part of Brazilian cities today.

Anonymous

#30. 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