Quotes About Class

Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush.

But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox—a class divide in which class doesn't matter—is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature

like most conservatives, she believes that Clinton was in fact a man of the radical left. Rather, she is trying to construct an entire system of class relations on the observation that the haughty hedonists of Hollywood are largely Democrats.

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you'll need in the society of the future.

This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.

We're all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practise.

The histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher class.

The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.

The generosity of the poor, Sera marveled to herself. It puts us middle-class people to shame. They should hate our guts, really. Instead, they treat us like royalty. The thought of how she herself treated Bhima—not allowing her to sit on the furniture, having her eat with separate utensils—filled her with guilt. Yet she knew that if she tried to change any of these rituals, Feroz would have a fit.

lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.

The simple math of trickle-down economics," said Steve. "It's expensive to be poor.

Capital punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment.

I was no Marie Antoinette. I was not born to nobility, but I had a human right to nobility.

I've never met a woman ever, anywhere, bar none, that was more feminine than Dixie Carter.

I'm just a normal working class boy from Belfast.

I didn't like the attention and that's what's awesome about Rice. I would go to class, walk around campus and do my thing. No one even noticed who I was.

The ruling classes today nourish the conviction that national hatreds and rivalries are inevitable.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.

I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.