Quotes About Class

Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture." "Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

I'm sick of this white poverty, the vulgarity of my daily life.

Conchita Clossen in Edith Wharton's unfinished novel of transatlantic husband hunting, The Buccaneers.

Alva embodied a curious contradiction in that she felt she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.

Und ich hasse die Mittelschichts-Blödmänner, die so viel zu sagen haben, aber nie einen einzigen verdammten Tag mit dem Versuch verbracht haben, am Leben zu bleiben.

Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class.

As for diversity within the military itself, highly publicized instances of tokenism—female officers becoming fighter pilots or graduating from the army's Ranger School—divert attention from gaping inequities related to class.

The next day, Less hears Dr. Balk is down with a mysterious illness. In class, two young women quietly faint at their desks; as they collapse, their twin ponytails fly up like the tails of frightened deer. Less is beginning to see a pattern.

It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest

Carma, Here are the Pants and a little sketch I made of Leo. From memory, not from life. (And no, I'm not thinging of him day and night. God.) Funny hair, huh? He did not realize I was in his class. I think I'm making a big impression around here. Love you, Len

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to claim that there are "two Americas," the rich and the poor. If Democrats have their way, there will be two Latin Americas, both of them poor. You're living in one of them right now.

I can sing," said Margo. (Claire was sniffling and rubbing her knee.) "We sing all the time in music class at school. Listen to this. It's the song about the smart reindeer: Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear." "Margo," I said when she had finished. I paused to think. Margo was giggling away at her reindeer joke, but there was a little problem. She couldn't carry a tune. She might have been singing any song. Any song at all.

Ah, Sir, said she, a man of your observation must know, that the daughters of a decayed family of some note in the world, do not easily get husbands. Men of great fortunes look higher: Men of small must look out for wives to enlarge them; and men of genteel businesses are afraid of young women better born than portioned. Every-body knows not that my girls can bend to their condition; and they must be contented to live single all their lives;

La guerra no solo forjó una identidad para los pueblos, sino que además organizó a la sociedad, dándoles a los guerreros la casta más alta. La primera nobleza, tanto en Europa como en Asia y África, fue el estamento militar. Hubo que esperar hasta la llegada del capitalismo, mucho después, para que se exaltara a la burguesía trabajadora, en un fenómeno muy ligado al crecimiento de las ciudades.

Last period of the day was new gym class. It was her only class that didn't include Evan, which was a relief. She should be functioning at a peak concentration, but he and his luminous eyes kept distracting her. First opprtunity I have, she thought. I'll bite him.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights," Washington wrote. "For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)

He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life.

And it is not hard to guess what he, the descendant of serfs, risen to a position of such might, must have experienced. Confronting the leaders of the bourgeois West, so long feared and hated, he saw himself to be tougher, deeper, and more intelligent than any of them.

If they were meant to really be together, why had they been born a prince and a commoner? And if they weren't, why did she feel this way inside?

What provokes me worst of all are our fateful bourgeois distinctions of rank. Of course I know as well as anyone that differences of class are necessary, and that they work greatly to my own advantage: but I wish they would not place obstacles in my way when I might enjoy a little pleasure...

In response to his question, she warned, "There will not be any more kissing. You were an excellent teacher. I graduated from your class." He laughed,though he was quick to rejoin, "How disappointing. You were supposed to claim ineptitude and ask for further guidance.

A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.