Quotes About Class

We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.

I'm 40 years old. What I have seen my whole life is widening income inequality.

It was the class and dignity which he led his life that made him part of all of us. I will forever treasure the close friendship we shared over the years.

I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second.

The poor are the human manure in which grow the harvests of life, the harvests of joy which the rich reap.

Outer space is no place for a person of breeding.

I've had to spend an awful lot of my life trying to pretend I'm not posh. Although once I open my mouth, I rather let things out the bag.

People with money love Gershwin.

Invisible Man. A Passage to India. The Magnificent Ambersons.

The artist creates his own elite, and the elite its own artists.

I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...

You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom. - Every one admits that. - Your Socialists don't. - My Socialists do. Yours mayn't; but I strongly suspect yours of being not Socialists, but ninepins, which you have constructed for your own amusement. I can't imagine any living creature who would bowl over quite so easily.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see some one near us tottering that we realise all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.

For if the will can overlap class, civilization as we have made it will go to pieces.

To alter poor people until they became exactly like the people who were not so poor

By all means subscribe to charities — subscribe to them largely — but don't get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform. I see a good deal behind the scenes, and you can take it from me that there is no Social Question — except for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase. There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal

They had all passed up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place to some ample room, whither he could never follow them, not if he read for ten hours a day. Oh, it was no good, this continual aspiration. Some are born cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy. To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him.

Nowadays people can be divided into three classes - the haves the have-nots and the have-not-paid-for-what-they-haves.

You may tempt the upper classesWith your villainous demitasses,But Heaven will protect the working girl.