Quotes About Class

Populism and elitism are the same thing. They are class prejudices, crude class prejudices that so-and-so, because they are uneducated, is less worthy, or so-and-so, because they are richer or more educated, is unworthy.

In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.

Wars between classes might just replace one set of pigs with another, but they had some underlying point to them. Wars between nations, as far as Russell could see, had absolutely none. The

The phrases 'certainty is an illusion' and 'think probabilistically about the world', both introduced in the first class, are the first two examples of high-level concepts which Dan calls airport ideas.

whenever there are some people calling for the elimination of the class that lives by collecting interest, there will be others to object that this will destroy the livelihood of widows and pensioners.

the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like 'inequality' sounds like it's practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It's possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it's not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean.

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

Our civilization overflows with charity—which is simply willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of real help—just wages for honest labor—there is little, for real help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes. She

In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other.

One percent of the population ruled—and they were all grafters—while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.

He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.

This translates into a hypothesis about actually existing capitalism: that the more it is structured and organized according to this utopian liberal or neoliberal vision, the greater the class inequalities. And there is, it goes without saying, plenty of evidence to support the view that the rhetoric of free markets and free trade and their supposed universal benefits to which we have been subjected these past thirty years have produced exactly the result that Marx would expect:

So what is going on? For the men and women separately, the crew had a higher survival rate than the third-class passengers. But overall the crew had a lower survival rate than the third-class passengers. This is not a trick—the numbers are what they are.

The thing about Walmart was that even a man like Dwayne Brewer could go unnoticed. People pushed their buggies with dead-eyed stares, everything sliding by in the periphery. Consumerism scaled this large had a way of camouflaging class.

Wealthy people are just as patriotic as poor people, I honest to God believe that.

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.

Simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.

The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

Menswear is about subtlety. It's about good style and good taste.

There is no class of people in the world, who have such good memories as creditors.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.