Quotes About Class

Of course, an English aristocrat might have some contact with the staff downstairs and could adequately say a thing or two about inter-class dramas unfolding in the household. But something less parochial might be harder to come by. This is relevant because stories about the divisiveness of class are by definition stories that straddle class boundaries. A story about a miner in a mining town is not obviously one that speaks to the divisiveness of class. In other words, class doesn't just divide us in the world but it also divides us in the stories we're presented.

In high school, I was the class comedian as opposed to the class clown. The difference is the class clown is the guy who drops his pants at the football game, the class comedian is the guy who talked him into it.

The first class of readers may be compared to an hour-glass, their reading being as the sand; it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second class resembles a sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third class is like a jelly-bag, which allows all that is pure to pass away, and retains only the refuse and dregs. The fourth class may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gems.

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

The range of individuality in children is infinite, but every class of children seemed to have the same groups. And there was a chief girl and a chief boy - a girl that all the other girls of that age looked up to and imitated and a boy that all the boys looked up to and imitated. I realized that if I got them on my side and exclusively taught them for a couple of weeks, maybe for the first full term, then I wouldn't have any trouble. Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they're the boss of the class; they're not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.

The Marxist combination of materialism and determinism is fatally anti-humanistic. It denies a consciousness, a mind, that is independent of material conditions and class relations. It denies a will and volition that are capable of shaping the course of history. It denies an individuality that is not reducible to class. It denies both the idea and the reality of freedom, a freedom that is something more than the "bourgeois" freedom to buy and sell. It denies a morality that transcends class interests. And it denies the spirituality of man.

It is only the working class at the head of the masses, it is only the working class headed by its real Marxist-Leninist party, it is only the working class through armed revolution, through violence, that can and must bury the traitorous revisionists.

So in my sophomore year, I took a senior anatomy class. I thought anatomy - being the thing that I should be most interested in - and if I could hack, as we called it, a senior class, I would continue. I didn't hack the senior class.

That just shows you their type of class and integrity. They claim to be first class and the best organization. It's an embarrassment and it shows the lack of class that they really have.....The Eagles would be undefeated right now with Green Bay's quarterback. We'd probably be in a much better position with him on the team (instead of present Eagles quarterback Donavon McNabb).

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.

It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking - Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management - were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working class Americans, but for white working class.

I really wanted people to pay attention to me and like me. And the class clown thing, you know? There's a weird desperation to the class clown when you really investigate it. Why are they trying to be the clown so much? They're filling some kind of hole.

The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up.

Intersectionality has made an important contribution to social and political analysis, asking all of us to think about what assumptions of race and class we make when we speak about "women" or what assumptions of gender and race we make when we speak about "class." It allows us to unpack those categories and see the various kinds of social formations and power relations that constitute those categories.

My roots, my background and the way I act is working class, but it would be hypsocritical to say I'm anything else than middle class now.

Because [Donald Trump] so clearly - through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies - represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

Sinclair Lewis was asked one time to give a talk to class of students about writing. When he got there he asked the class, Do you people want to be writers?and they all said yes. Then Lewis said, Why the hell aren't you at home writing?

In Britain, class is a neurosis. You judge people from the moment they open their mouth and start speaking: what their accent represents in terms of where they were educated, what part of the country they're from, what kind of class background they have.

Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.

To become a world-class university takes a lot of time. There are simply no shortcuts. People tend to assume, and I have encountered this sort of thinking all over the world, that if they just sink enough money into a university, it will emerge in a few years as a first-class institution. But such rapid growth never happens. It takes time; it takes generations.

I really had wanted to learn Italian for a long time. I think ever since - or even maybe even before I had read Dante. And I just sort of had this idea that I wanted to read Dante in Italian. And then in my office, we actually had a class - an Italian class.

You have a class of investors and you have a class of speculators. The speculators historically haven't been big enough to cause the investors to doubt the long-term vision of stock.

A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush's shovel.

I grew up as a dancer, and music and dance are so closely tied, that in ballet class you're listening to all this classical music, and in modern class you're working with a live drummer. It was something that always made me feel really comfortable and I've had a connection to since the beginning.

I had no real direction at all in my 20's and so I did what a lot of people without direction do: I took an acting class. In one of those first days of the class, I did this weird, silly improv, and it got laughs. It was such a blissful moment. I've never gotten over that love of hearing laughter. As a people pleaser, it's the drug of choice for me.

Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.

Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property--thus excluding others from the freedom they gain--the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.

A second-class mind dealing with third-class material is hardly a necessity of life.

Bernie Sanders talks about socialism in Scandinavia, and he's correct to point to the huge victories the working class has won there through struggle, such as socialized medicine, free college education, and paid family leave. But if you talk to working people in Sweden or Norway today, you will find out that many of those past gains have been eroded and some virtually eliminated, including massive under-funding of healthcare and other public services and a return to for-profit systems that are unaffordable to working class people.

Donald Trump is pulling off a world-class scam here. I mean, he's telling people he's all these things that he's never been his entire life. He says he's fighting for the little guy, the working class. He has spent his entire business career sticking it to working people.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.

We want to emulate the educated class, even if we don't think of educated people as a class these days.

He was not subordinate to God - Adam was walking as a god! What he said "went," what he did "counted"; and when he bowed his knee to Satan and put Satan up above him then there wasn't anything God could do about it because a "god" had placed Satan there. Adam, remember, was created in the god-class, but when he committed high treason he fell below the god-class.

The traveler to the United States will do wellto prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.

The moral climate within the ruling class in this country is not that different from the moral climate within the ruling class of Hitler's Germany

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends... . In England, for instance, you find everyone in your class has read the same books. Here, people grope for something in common-like a newly engaged girl who came to me and said, "It's absolutely wonderful! His uncle and my cousin were on the same football team.

I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.

Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they're the boss of the class; they're not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.

The Canadian middle class is under less pressure than any other middle class in any developed country on the planet. So they feel good. They feel optimistic. They feel secure.

Coming out of my first yoga class, I was astonished that there were nothing but hot girls there. Just 55 girls, Bobby Shriver, who's a buddy of mine, and myself. I came out of class, I was so high. I been sober 26 years, but I'm an ex-druggie.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

If a student takes a Stanford computer class and a Princeton business class, it shows they are motivated and have skills. We know it has helped employees get better jobs.

Also, because schools must teach the spirit of goodwill, the habit of helping others around you, every class should have this rule: students, if you bring software to class you may not keep it for yourself.

I remember when I took the role on E.R., I thought, 'I haven't really been able to play a working class woman. I've played girls, I've played funny, but I haven't played a working class woman. That sounds like something I'd like to do.