Quotes About Socioeconomic

I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent. In England in the 1980s and 1990s this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

With upper- and middle-class lawns, there's more hidden, whereas with working-class or poor lawns, there's more out to see. It just sits right out there. Very honest. Like the people.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

When the women's movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the '60s besides a women's movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

The piano has disappeared from working-class family life, which is a shame. It's associated with the middle classes now. Everyone in my family sang and played piano, but my parents were delighted and amazed when I became the first professional performer in the family - apart from a clog-dancer way back.

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.

We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class. It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

Tins with ringpulls tend to belong to those with slightly more disposable income; look at the Basics and Value ranges next time you are in the supermarket and you will see that they require a tin opener to get into them.

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.

the most successful eighth graders from poor economic backgrounds had only the same chance of attaining a bachelor's degree as the least successful eighth graders from the wealthiest echelon of society

It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.

The poor never get the job done they are sleepy.

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

You can see them from your car window when you drive home every night. Try not to look away. Try to meet their eyes.

The West Side had become a land where people lived in layers. It was a land of prosperous immigrants. It was a place where people rented, rather than owned

Poor economic conditions translate to spikes in crime, suicide, spousal abuse, malnutrition, alcoholism, and abortion.

Better educated or financially comfortable people often smile more than less educated or economically distressed people.

The middle class, one of the great achievements in history, is becoming more of a relic than a reality.

I looked over and saw the palsied children battling with their food. No amount of exposure to the members of the privileged class was going to bring them membership in the Yacht Club, an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Upper Crust Debutante Ball of San Marino, or a Mercedes in the garage.