Quotes About Class

What I liked most was that George had class, the way he walked and talked, reading Shakespeare and all those books. He knew about van Gogh and Picasso, he gave me a book about Dali. And just the way he conducted himself, you could see it. He was very elegant in his manners.

I could've been a contender. I could've had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let's face it, which is what I am.

I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.

every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

Sailors are the only class of men who now-a-days see anything like stirring adventure; and many things which to fire-side people appear strange and romantic, to them seem as common-place as a jacket out at elbows.

I cannot waste my time teaching mediocrity, to J. Henry Harper, when he quit teaching an open-to-all illustrating class at Drexel Institute... from Where Your Heart Is...The Story of Harvey Dunn, Artist. page 32.

I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.

A jury is always a more orthodox body than any defendant brought before it; for blacks it is usually a whiter group, for poor people, a more prosperous group... Another lesson about the justice system: the way the judge charges the jury inevitably pushes them one way or the other, limits their independent judgment.

The country therefore was not "born free" but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.

party politics and religion now substituting for class conflict.

Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them did much of the actual fighting and suffering between 1775 and 1783: A very old story.

Free white workers were better off than slaves or servants, but they still resented unfair treatment by the wealthier classes.

In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.

I could only think one troubling thought: the police, the state, did the bidding of the holders of great wealth. How much freedom of speech and freedom of assembly you had depended on what class you were in.

The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children's playgrounds , to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

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.

We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes.

The very poor could not be counted on to support the government. They were like the slaves and Indians—invisible most of the time, but frightening to the elite if they started an uprising. Other citizens, though, might support the system. Farmers who owned their land, better-paid laborers, and urban office workers were paid just enough, and flattered just enough, that in a crisis they would be loyal to the system and the upper classes that dominated it. Big

It was the potential combination of poor whites and blacks that caused the most fear among the wealthy white planters.

at the same time he was remarkably prescient in writing about what he calls the "99 percent" versus the "1 percent" years before the Occupy movement popularized these terms. (Interestingly, others claimed credit for this slogan—or were given credit for it—ignoring Howard's much earlier use of the terms in this book.)

From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two classes—paupers and millionaires….

the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with