Quotes About Class

cultural anxieties are often a privilege of the rich.

Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.

As young Scipio Nasica found to his cost, the success of the rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole. An

It turned out to be a lesson for the patricians – learned the hard way – that the gods communicated with plebeians too.

It is unclear which terrified the authorities most: the revolutionary potential of the Marxist 'subversives', based on class, or that of the UNIA, based on race.

Money can't buy you friends; but you do get a better class of enemies.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law

To be angry, poverty has to rub shoulders with wealth.

When you are on the lowest rung of society, you are a comforting reminder to those just a bit above you that life could always be worse, that they are not you.

The poor stole what they could from the rich, and the rich stole what they could from the working poor - one act called crime, the other, industry

Gentlemen do not work. Since I do not work, therefore I must be a gentleman.

The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

I enrolled him in karate," Alice said. "I went to different schools and found the one with the shortest lines. I knew if the classes were big and he had to wait for his turn too long, he'd get in trouble for turning somersaults in line. He loves it. I was worried he'd use it on the playground and get into more trouble, but the karate instructors teach the kids to be very disciplined. It's been great.

Agatha Swanburne - "Some things just sound better in French.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

If you're a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren't listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.

poor white trash became the subject of extensive public debates in the antebellum period.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

Inequality… has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class

Therefore, when we speak of ourselves as divided into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, we must be understood always to imply that within each of these classes there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call them,??persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection

The task of the 9.9 percent is to lubricate the machinery that administers the pain—and then to suggest by example that the 90 percent have a shot at the joining them in a life of ease, if only they would work just a little harder.

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics. —PLUTARCH I