Quotes About Class

La « classe mobilisée » ou perçue comme mobilisable et donc idéalisée, héroïsée même, diffère des individus qui la composent Ã¢â'¬â€œ ou la composent potentiellement. Et je détestais de plus en plus me retrouver au contact immédiat de ce qu'étaient Ã¢â'¬â€œ de ce que sont – les classes populaires.

J'ai reconnu très précisément ce que j'ai vécu à ce moment-là en lisant les livres qu'Annie Ernaux a consacrés à ses parents et à la « distance de classe » qui la séparait d'eux.

Qui ti volevo, caro il mio signore di buona famiglia. Un borghese, sei, ecco la questione, schifosamente borghese, con la testa piena di pregiudizi borghesi, orgoglioso della tua rispettabilità borghese. Cosa vuoi che se ne facesse la Laide della tua rispettabilità borghese? E tu cos'eri per lei?

What remains a mystery, however, is not the financial details of his everyday life, but how he, like his comrades Trotsky and Stalin—none of them ever having worked for a living, and none of them having anything in common with the working class—could think they had the right to determine the fate of a great nation, and to carry out their bloody, monstrous experiment.

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

The lower the class of the affair, the more likely the band will be invited to eat.

you do understand we live in Cheapside, on Gracechurch Street. It is truly quite a beautiful residential street, but not a part of town those in high society frequent. Are you sure you do not mind your carriage being seen there?" "Miss

Well, that's a big chunk of truth, Eddie thinks. The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash. That stuff makes itself. They get made in the backseats of junk cars, and then they live in them.

The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash.

Many a time a poor soul has been put before the dock, to save the neck of the wealthy.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

Scallops are expensive, so they should be treated with some class. But then, I suppose that every creature that gives his life for our table should be treated with class.

An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life.

shirts, white tails reaching her

Halfway through class he sends me a note. He's drawn spiderwebs around the edges. It says, I'll be on time tomorrow. I smile as I read it. Then I put it in my backpack, in my French textbook so the page won't crease or crumble. I want to keep it so when this is over, I can have something to look at and remember what it was like to be Peter Kavinsky's girlfriend. Even if it was all just pretend.

An elite is inevitable.

All of that requires that they do what you're talking about: destroying our empathy and reducing our faith in reason. Those guys on the border laughed when they let you through because you're not even human to them. You're a unit of something else. They rename you 'test subject' or 'enemy,' or they assign you a race or a nation or a class—and then they don't have to think about you anymore.

Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.

The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those in the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder—some 117 million of them—earnings haven't changed since the 1970s.

deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower. It's also been shown to dampen economic growth.

The passion for having must lead to never-ending class war. The pretense of the communists that their system will end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their system is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as the goal of living. As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be formations of classes, there must be class war, and in global terms, there must be international war. Greed and peace preclude each other.

Although champagne was served, the mood was curiously subdued. After this reunion, they would probably never meet together as a class again—at least not in such numbers. They would spend the next decades reading obituaries of the men who had started out in 1954 as rivals and today were leaving Harvard as brothers. This was the beginning of the end. They had met once more and just had time enough to learn that they liked one another. And to say goodbye.

Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.