Top 100 Working Class Sayings
#1. At the time, Jean-Claude [Juncker] was already an important man in Brussels. I was a young representative in the European Parliament. We talked for a long time and from that point on, our connection became increasingly deep. But our working-class origins are at least as important to our bond.
Martin Schulz
#2. Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.
Will Shetterly
#3. For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home.
Valerie Miner
#4. When you come from the working class and you do well enough whereby you can provide a little bit better for your family, get a decent roof over their head and send them to a good school, that's considered a good thing.
Michael Moore
#5. I feel sometimes that there's this sense that people are poor because they want to be, or they're working-class because they want to be or because they don't work hard enough. I feel like there's this demonization of working people in general, but specifically definitely labor union members.
Linda Sanchez
#6. But it was there, and studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.
J.D. Vance
#7. There is a working class - strong and happy - among both rich and poor: there is an idle class - weak, wicked, and miserable - among both rich and poor.
John Ruskin
#8. I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.
JR
#9. What I do believe absolutely is that in the middle of a recession, the American middle class and working class needs a tax relief.
Bernie Sanders
#10. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#11. My parents grew up working class, but in that way that working class families do, they spent a fortune on education to better me.
Graham Norton
#12. I was born and raised in a suburb of Paris by a working-class family.
Olivier Martinez
#13. What those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous of years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or |what was equally sinful| giving way individualistically to inner sorrows.
Milan Kundera
#14. We will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout.
Bernie Sanders
#16. 'Rapa Nui' is about the conflict in the 1600s on Easter Island. It's about the clash of the royal clan and the working class.
Jason Scott Lee
#17. 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
#18. Baltimore's often called the most northern Southern town. It has a distinct essence. It's definitely post-industrial, definitely Rust Belt, very working-class. I grew up outside of Washington, and I felt I was moving to a completely different place when I moved 30 miles north out of college.
David Simon
#19. Only the Irish working class remains as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland.
James Connolly
#20. So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And
Amy Goldstein
#21. The first thing is to raise hell," says I. "That's always the first thing to do when you're faced with an injustice and you feel powerless. That's what I do in my fight for the working class.
Mary Harris Jones
#22. However you want to define these two groups and their approach to giving - rich and poor; educated and uneducated; upper-class and working-class - their members increasingly occupy two separate worlds. As
J.D. Vance
#23. Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
#24. I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.
Bobby Sands
#25. I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
Tom Jones
#26. I grew up in a very working-class family and also a very fundamentalist Christian family. So, we didn't have access to the arts in the house in any form other than the Sunday funnies.
Craig Thompson
#27. It's just about bein' yourself ... even when you're on the dole, it's about your leather jacket. Music is the last refuge of the working class, along with football ... in fact, gigs and riots are the only things left.
Pete Doherty
#28. I feel that I helped the working class by just saying there are no barriers, which I consider to be true.
Michael Caine
#29. You don't have a very motivated working class, it starts to affect the dynamics of the economy. If workers are disenchanted and disenfranchised, productivity losses will go along with that.
James Sinegal
#30. Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.
Margaret Sanger
#31. I love seeing America vote, through the prism of my older working class neighborhood in Riverside, California.
Susan Straight
#32. I've been lucky from my earliest memory on. I happened to be born to the right parents, and the lives we led - working class, migratory - suited my personality. I had an adventurous mindset, and we lived on an Army base, then in South Dakota - it was a dynamic environment.
Tom Brokaw
#33. Research highlights a striking link between between encouraging child-raising and class. Half of working-class parents' interactions with their 12-18 month-olds were affirming, versus 80% among the affluent and 20% among those in poverty.
Betty Hart
#34. The colors black and white are my uniform, to honor the working class. People like my parents, who were janitors and had to wear a uniform every day. It keeps me grounded.
Janelle Monae
#35. I'm a working class lad. So at 25, and with no-one in our family having any theatrical inclination, when I said, 'I'm going to scratch all that and become an actor,' I may as well have said I was going to be a Premiership footballer for the chance I'd have.
Rob James-Collier
#36. I came from a real working-class show business family.
Sally Field
#37. It appears then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.
Karl Marx
#38. The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.
Michael Gove
#39. Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.
Rosa Luxemburg
#40. Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.
Martin Scorsese
#41. The northern part of Sweden is considered more isolated, not so sociable, not so educated, more unemployment, very working-class, and people drink more than rest of Sweden; that's the kind of area I'm from.
Asa Larsson
#42. I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world
Vivienne Westwood
#43. To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul [McCartney] is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'.
John Lennon
#44. In all of my books, I really want to work with working-class people. My goal is to show the moments of grace and dignity in their lives.
Matt De La Pena
#45. Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.
Frank Rich
#46. It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.
Peter Capaldi
#47. I don't know anyone, from any class, who's had a perfectly easy life. I've met people born into wealthy families who feel like they didn't have much emotional support, and people who come from working-class families who had loads of love but no money.
Paloma Faith
#48. Before the arrival of the Credit Union, people who were from the poor background or a working class background couldn't borrow from banks.
John Hume
#49. The future and the hope for the middle class church lies in the renewal of its lifeblood, which is only possible if the church succeeds in winning the working class.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#50. I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.
Alex Ferguson
#51. The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Industrial Workers Of The World
#52. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to money. My parents were very working class and constantly working. There was always a very strong work ethic and that's put a more conservative, "save for a rainy day" mentality into me.
Lemar
#53. With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
Adrian McKinty
#54. We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.
Noam Chomsky
#55. The working class positively benefited from Hitler's rule, under which the standard of living was raised till it became the highest in Europe.
Hugh Trevor-Roper
#56. I may, and I think I represent a tradition that means a lot to me, which has really always been about fighting for others, for middle-class families, for working class - for working people, you know, and that's a tradition and a commitment that I take very seriously.
Caroline Kennedy
#57. I had great memories of growing up in a working class estate. I remember it being sunny all the time. So we're putting that on screen. It's not people wallowing in degradation.
Ricky Gervais
#58. I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
Nic Pizzolatto
#59. It was important to focus on working-class women because we so rarely focus, particularly in period films, on the working people. The suffragettes brought together women of all classes, which was one of the striking things about the movement.
Sarah Gavron
#60. If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!
Mother Jones
#61. In a way, I'm lucky that I was never classically trained and never went to a music college. I'm just from a normal working class family and happened to get obsessed with music as a teenager.
Imelda May
#62. Those who advocate devaluation are calling for a reduction in the wage levels and the real wage standards of every member of the working class.
James Callaghan
#63. We tend to admire the people in our society who have accumulated such wealth as to seem somehow great. But we shouldn't forget that it was the everyday working class man who made this country great.
Armstrong Williams
#64. Much like the opportunities that factory work provided for working-class Americans in the last century, microwork will provide opportunities for marginalized people in this one. All they really need is basic literacy, a cheap computer, and an internet hookup.
Leila Janah
#65. Eight Hours For What We Will is a major contribution to modern American working-class history and to the history of a changing American popular and mass culture.
Herbert Gutman
#66. I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.
Noam Chomsky
#67. The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#68. In the fourth quadrant (lower right), working-class people are motivated to take on green-collar jobs and start green businesses.
Van Jones
#69. I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev
#70. I don't like to play the macho card, but I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class culture.
Tom Brokaw
#71. The same theme can be found in Carol Reed's pioneering The Stars Look Down, in which three classic avenue of escape from the working class are posited: crime, football and education.
Peter Wollen
#72. I'm entirely uneducated. I went to public school - public in the American sense - a blue-collar, working-class school. I never got a scholarship, I left when I was 15, never did any exams.
Rupert Graves
#73. The Democratic Party has lost much of it credibility with working class and low-income people. It retards progress toward presenting a genuine alternative.
Paul Wellstone
#74. I'm very much in the trenches, and I don't live in the lap of luxury. I come from a working-class military family. We watch the news and read the paper and vote, so there's always something to be upset about. I always have a certain amount of angst in my back pocket.
Pink
#75. There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
Mark Haddon
#76. My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
Jim Crace
#77. If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.
Anthony Bourdain
#78. The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.
Ernest Mandel
#79. My roots, my background and the way I act is working class, but it would be hypsocritical to say I'm anything else than middle class now.
John Prescott
#80. Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.
Bill Pascrell
#81. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.
Joel Kinnaman
#82. I come from a working-class background in Queens, New York.
Amy Ryan
#83. You don't understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana, "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Whittaker Chambers
#84. Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.
Yelawolf
#85. I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.
Eileen Myles
#86. I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn't one of them ... I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.
Tracey Ullman
#87. When I was a kid, I was watching the movies my parents wanted to watch. I came from a working class family, not specifically educated, so we were watching popular movies. My dad liked cowboy movies, so we were watching cowboy movies. Some of them were amazing. It's a genre of movie I like very much.
Olivier Martinez
#88. We are committing ourselves to basic protections of our people ... We will not permit banks to repossess the homes of working class and middle class people. That's the end of that, it is not negotiable.
Alexis Tsipras
#89. It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid.
Edward Norton
#90. I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.
Dwight Yoakam
#91. Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.
Israel Horovitz
#92. Animals, children, and the working class comprise the company in which I'll feel most at ease.
Russell Brand
#93. My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.
Denise Mina
#94. I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
Sandra Cisneros
#95. The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.
Michael Caine
#96. Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both.
Daniel De Leon
#97. A working class hero is something to be.
John Lennon
#98. I think in theory, Donald Trump could be a formidable candidate, right? The theory of him is, if he ignites working class white voters, he can put Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, states like Ohio in play for the Republicans.
Joy-Ann Reid
#99. When you live around a working-class environment, you see what sports means to people. You see that it's the escape over the weekend. you see how they build their lives around it. People sort of want to get away from their lives.
Joe Posnanski
#100. As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It's less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself.
Eddie Marsan
