Quotes About Class

But after all, to kind of like people, doc, puts you in a pretty privileged class for a start--so few citizens can afford to really kinda like people.

Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?" "Yes," Ted had said. "Then I can't help you," Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.

Moreover, just as I was terrified of addressing my own racism, so, too, other women were afraid of stepping into the deep and messy waters of class and sexual desire. If we get into this, what might we lose? If we expose this, what might our enemies do with it? And what might it mean? Will we have to throw out all the theory we have built with such pain and struggle? Will we have to start over? How are we going to try to make each other safe while we work it through?

You are proving, aren't you,' said Philippa contemptuously, 'that to be base-born makes you a fourth-rate son of a fourth-rate little country?

So I am a Socialist," said Ingleby, "but I can't stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn't happen." "If everybody had the same face," said Bredon, "there'd be no pretty women.

Duke's son, cook's son, son of a hundred kings – people will stand there for hours on end, with their ear-drums splitting – why? Simply for the pleasure of being idle while other people work.

Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it.

As is typical of Maya inscriptions, not a single one at Copán mentions a commoner. Working folk had to build all those buildings. Farmers had to feed all those laborers along with the holy lords and nobles. This type of class division usually works when everyone believes they are part of a system, with each person occupying a valued place in society and contributing to the vital ceremonies that maintain the cosmic order.

Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!

Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training. And remember they cannot answer back. You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you. If you are impolite, they will despise you, and rightly, because you have not acted like a lady.

About Miss Debenham," he said rather awkwardly. "You can take it from me that she's all right. She's a pukka sahib. "What," asked Dr. Constantine with interest, "does a pukka sahib mean?" "It means," said Poirot, "that Miss Debenham's father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot was." "Oh!" said Dr. Constantine, disappointed. "Then it has nothing to do with the crime at all." "Exactly," said Poirot.

It wasn't what you were born to, and no good comes from getting out of your station in life.

He chews the gum which I believe is not done in good circles.

Mr. Satterthwaite's conversation was apt to be unduly burdened by mentions of his titled acquaintances.

What," asked Dr. Constantine with interest, "does a pukka sahib mean?" "It means," said Poirot, "that Miss Debenham's father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot.

What I say is a gentleman's a gentleman even if he does drive a tractor.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

The characteristic feature of contemporary literary radicalism is that it rarely addresses the question of its own determination by the conditions of its production and the class location of its agents. In the rare case where this issue of one's own location-- hence of the social determination of one's own practice-- is addressed at all, even fleetingly, the stance is characteristically that of a very poststructuralist kind of ironic self- referentiality and self-pleasuring.

the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.

It is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs

Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress.