Quotes About Class

Do you remember last fall, in Julian's class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?" "Yes," I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. "Well, we decided to try to have one." For a moment I thought I hadn't understood him. "What?" I said. "I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.

The laws are like spiders' webs: just as spiders' webs catch the weaker creatures but let the stronger ones through, so the humble and poor are restricted by the laws, but the rich and powerful are not bound by them (Valerius Maximus Memorable Deeds and Sayings 7.2 ext. 14).

At my high school I felt like Einstein—now I realize why. Half the kids were stupid and the other half were stoned. At Yale I'm the stupid one. And the stupider I feel the less I go to class, which makes me fall more behind, which makes me feel stupider.

I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Some guys got class even if they're cops. When

I've been sniffing out the guys in my English class (to the extent that this is possible without getting my throat cut), but they smell the same way they always do: like feet and testicles. As opposed to freesias. I don't want to keep sniffing them, Lyd. - Letter from Seb to Lyd.

You the first in your tribe to go to college? Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.

Lo asombroso cuando se considera el modo de vida de esta clase dirigente es que una de sus categorías esenciales, la de los sacerdotes, vive en la austeridad y la pobreza [...]. La riqueza no se busca por la riqueza misma [...].

Tories rated their colleagues according to which public school they went to; for Labour members the proudest boast was to have been the son of a miner.

I had just begun to notice that people who knew the correct way to do things such as hold a teacup, put food on a fork and bring it to their mouth without making a mess on the front of their dress—they were the people responsible for the most misery, the people least likely to end up insane or paupers.

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

It was graffiti tagging for rich people, except they used plaques instead of spray paint.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.

There is no more prideful creature than a man born poor.

Only the rich, he said not a little bitterly, can afford to act like income does not matter.

Then again, I don't suppose the very poor care much about the doings of the rich, either. The gulf is too wide. Not many have been on both sides of it, as we have.

In contrast to Marxism, with its emphasis on class struggle between owners and workers, modernization traces conflict to the disparity between modernizing forces and traditional groups who are left behind or resist incorporation into the modern world.

As much as he loved to fly, in the prewar years he regarded his RAF aircraft more as a tool for cracking open English high society than as a weapon for defeating Britain's enemies.

The custom of confession seemed designed to encourage sin by granting ready forgiveness. Neither Abigail nor any member of her family ever wavered in their preference for life in America over life in Europe. In France they lived far grander style than they ever lived in Braintree. ...her unshakable belief was that America was superior to Europe - superiority based on simplicity, its supposed lack of extreme wealth and class distinctions, its religion and its emphasis on family

He came from the tiny group of very grand aristocratic families who, as one of Bertie's cleverer mistresses observed, "believed they26 had the prescriptive right to rule England in the same way as they ruled their estates.

Death to the bourgeois on his knees, smelling of religion and not believing in God!