Quotes About Class

So long as discontent and unrest make themselves but dumbly felt within a limited social class, the powers of reaction may often succeed in suppressing such manifestations. But when the dumb unrest grows into conscious expression and becomes almost universal, it necessarily affects all phases of human thought and action, and seeks its individual and social expression in the gradual transvaluation of existing values.

Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.

Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted...

Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.

Le Bal du comte d'Orgel.

Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies 'languishing in listlessness' as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale. 4

It is the interactive presence of these two features of deprivation – being low class and being female – that can massively impoverish women from the less privileged classes.

J'ai toujours eu de l'aversion à la fois pour les riches et pour les pauvres. Ma patrie sociale, c'est l'entre-deux. Ni les possédants, ni les revendicateurs. J'appartiens à cette frange médiane qui, n'ayant ni la myopie des nantis ni l'aveuglement des affamés, peut se permettre de poser sur le monde un regard lucide.

Ce qui a eu pour effet d'accentuer fortement les inégalités sociales, au point de créer une petite caste d'hypermilliardaires, chacun d'eux plus riche que des nations entières.

History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.

Class was what formed you, but didn't travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He'd learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.

We have no money to bestow upon a class of people that is not taken from the whole people," he continued; the individual was going to lose out to the group.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges...

If you're poor it will be almost impossible to get a higher education that will allow you to get out of the lowest category. If, on the other hand, you have a fortune it will be far easier to do trade or to start a company than it would if you have to depend on borrowed money. The more money you have the easier it is to make more.

Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes.

today's West Europe these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes.

The fact that obesity in both Europe and America is chiefly a class-specific phenomenon—obese people disproportionately inhabit the lower rungs of the social scale on both sides of the Atlantic—appears hardly a matter for reflection and pales in comparison to the ubiquitous mention of the sole culprit: the "Americanization" of European life.

And that's Jake Drake, Know-It-All.

The rich Northeast and West of the United States, along with much of Europe, seem to have moved toward what might be called a postindustrial politics in which supporters of liberal and conservative parties differ more on religion than on income, and politics feels more like a culture war than a class war. Meanwhile, poorer states in the South and middle of the country look more like Mexico, with a more traditional pattern of votes of the rich and poor.

In the first years after the Revolutionary War, Baptist evangelicals in the South as well as throughout the country were deeply opposed to slavery. They believed that all were equal in the sight of God, criticized the categories of race and class, and embraced the cause of freedom for African Americans.

Americans believe in democracy. But their democracy works such that the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider. In America, the winners control an ever-increasing percentage of the nation's wealth. To be a member of the upper class is to have privileges, among them ensuring that it's someone else's kid who is getting shot at in Iraq or Afghanistan. These