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Quotes About Middle classes

It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.
~ Pankaj Mishra
Thomas was vaguely aware of the prejudice among the middle classes against the North of England. It mattered little to him – they were all Pommies.
~ Andrew Wareham
To cement the unity of the nation, Romania did what many new nations do (and go on doing): she expanded the public sector, thus creating jobs for the scions of the 'native' middle classes and of the lower nobility. The result was an elephantine bureaucracy, open to corruption and bribery,
~ Donald Sassoon
The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes: with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it preponderates.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
During this Lent term Maurice came out as a theologian. It was not humbug entirely. He believed that he believed, and felt genuine pain when anything he was accustomed to met criticism—the pain that masquerades among the middle classes as Faith. It was not Faith, being inactive. It gave him no support, no wider outlook. It didn't exist till opposition touched it, when it ached like a useless nerve.
~ E.M. Forster
The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.
~ E.M. Forster
You can't punish the middle classes for going to drama school - you need to punish the education system and the associative governments for devaluing the arts.
~ Jonathan Pryce
In Vienna, the rising politician Karl Lueger discovered that he could mobilize the lower classes by appealing to their fears of change and capitalism, their resentment of the prosperous middle classes, and their hatred of Jews, who came to stand in for the first two. He did so with such success that he became a mayor, over the opposition of Franz Joseph, in 1897 and remained, highly popular, in office until he died in 1910.
~ Margaret MacMillan
What is boasted of at the present time as the revival of religion, is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of bigotry; and where there is the strong permanent leaven of intolerance in the feelings of a people, which at all times abides in the middle classes of this country, it needs but little to provoke them into actively persecuting those whom they have never ceased to think proper objects of persecution.
~ John Stuart Mill
Antisemitism first flared up in Prussia immediately after the defeat by Napoleon in 1807, when the "Reformers" changed the political structure so that the nobility lost its privileges and the middle classes won their freedom to develop.
~ Hannah Arendt
Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism
~ Harold Bloom
Washington typically coddled undemocratic and corrupt Muslim governments, even as these countries' frustrated middle classes looked increasingly to conservative interpretations of Islam for social values and political ideas. In this way America unnecessarily made easier, to at least a small extent, the work of al Qaeda recruiters.
~ Steve Coll
The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children's playgrounds , to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
~ Howard Zinn
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
~ E. M. Forster
I find the middle classes kind of boring. The middle class has kind of been beaten like a dead horse by fictional writers. It's old news, and literature is supposed to bring new news, and for me, I feel I have to go as far out as I can to try and tell the kind of stories I want to tell.
~ David Means
We have broken the shackles of conservative socialism. The growing middle classes want the kind of standard of living you enjoy in the West. So what I'm selling is a lifestyle.
~ Vijay Mallya
If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.
~ Simon Hoggart
Moreover, it was social democracy and the welfare state that bound the professional and commercial middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II.
~ Tony Judt
So repression is not the sole reason why the Chinese middle classes are basically calm. Most of them accept an implicit social contract between the Chinese people and the Chinese government. As long as the Chinese government continues to deliver economic growth (with improvements in living conditions, including better environmental living conditions) and social and political stability, the Chinese people will accept the rule of the CCP.
~ Kishore Mahbubani
There will be others like him," replied Lanny, "unless we solve the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. The German middle classes, the little men like Hitler, were being wiped out, and he offered a millennium, also a scapegoat, the Jews. When he got the votes, he took them to the big industrialists and sold them for more campaign funds.
~ Upton Sinclair
the secret associations, the schools, in the name of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together
~ Victor Hugo
Bearing in mind most companies rely on the middle classes in developed countries to sell goods and services throughout the value chain, dealing with inequality is a matter of brutal enlightened self-interest. It's simple economics: Global stability equals global growth equals profits.
~ Richard Quest
Nothing was further from the mind of the original middle classes than any conception of the rights of man and citizen. Personal liberty itself was not claimed as a natural right. It was sought only for the advantages it conferred. This is so true that at Arras, for example, merchants tried to have themselves classed as serfs of the monastery of St. Vast in order to enjoy the exemption from the market-tolls which had been accorded to the latter.
~ Henri Pirenne
Stalin gave Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the technicians.
~ Victor Serge