Popular quotes about Class! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 199
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.
Zia Haider RahmanIn all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.
James Henry HammondThere is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS.
Timothy NoahThe third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn.
Charles Sanders PeirceThe Mexican people are increasingly middle class, and Mexico has substantially become a middle-class society. This is true despite the significant poverty, and the class and geographic inequality that have deep historical roots.
Alan BersinThe problem is we have a Wall Street-to-Washington access of power that has controlled the political climate. The donor class feeds the political class who does the dance that the donor class wants. And the result is federal government keeps getting bigger.
Mike HuckabeeIn the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Whittaker ChambersThe ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
Karl MarxThe history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.
Ed CraneYou have different levels of players. There's are Premier League, international and world-class levels. The world-class level is players at the peak of their career and there's only maybe 50 maximum in the whole world. Stevie moved from a Premier League player to an international player and then world class.
Gerard HoullierAny man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy.
Theodore RooseveltI 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.
Jack BlackI got a flash of ... what it means, now, 'you can't be too rich or too thin.' How well it works, will keep on working, because the vast majority of women will never be thin. Thin enough. How well the hope of class mobility keeps every mother dieting, and handing the diets down to her daughter, hoping the daughter may do even better. When you combine this with the fact that many non-white peoples tend to be heavier than white folks, dieting becomes a tool not only in enforcing class but in encouraging assimilation.
Elana DykewomonI'd love if people relearned the lessons of the 20th century all over again. Which is to say this country progressed economically and socially when we had a better balance between capital and labor. Neither capital or labor won every argument. The battle between the two created economic tension, and transformed the working class into the middle class, and grew the economy.
David SimonThe very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.
Noam ChomskyThe teacher always used me as an example to the class of good English and good storytelling because we all had to write the same stories. But she used to make me go out front - which I hated - and read my story to the class and I would get huge applause. Not because of who I was but because they truly enjoyed the stories I wrote.
Michael JacksonThe first time I took a Kundalini yoga class, I cried my eyes out afterwards. I was so moved by the meditation and singing "Long Time Sun" at the end of class. I felt like I was home.
Zoe McLellanAsk a kid who's struggling in math if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he'll tell you he feels like a moron. Ask the math genius if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he'll tell you he's sick of doing all the work during group projects. Sometimes, it's better to sort like with like.
Jodi PicoultThat until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
Haile SelassieIt's a peculiar thing about liberals. When it comes to middle-class people who are fully capable of caring for themselves, liberals seek to undermine their independence in every way possible. With seductive 'entitlements' like guaranteed retirement, health care, nutrition, education, and jobs, liberals attempt to lure the middle class into dependence on the state. But when it comes to those who are truly incompetent, those whose mental afflictions render them unable to manage their lives at all, liberals are suddenly transformed into absolutists for personal autonomy.
Mona CharenI 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.
Jillian HerveyA new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.
James WolcottWhat I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
Frantz FanonI do believe that we should substantially lower student debt in this country, which is crushing millions of people. We pay for it, in my view, by a tax on Wall Street speculation. The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need. Now, it is Wall Street's time to help the middle class.
Bernie SandersThe Trump administration's economic agenda is the right agenda. Corporate taxes have been driving capital and brains and companies overseas for a decade. It has caused huge damage in investment and jobs and productivity. It was a mistake. We have to fix it. Counterintuitively, that usually helps middle-class wages, and lower-class wages, and job formation.
Jamie DimonAfter all, if there is no class stratification in a society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its own interests.
Walter RodneyI like first class, but I don't like first class people - I prefer the people in coach. I like fine restaurants, but prefer the taste of McDonalds. I like to be perfect, but I don't like perfection - I think it's dangerous. There is nothing after perfection. I know, I am a walking contradiction.
Alber ElbazI don't need to get any validation by someone else who sits next to me in first class. If you think a seat in first class makes you a star, then you're not one.
Curtis JacksonI grew up in dance studios. I was forced to be in several numbers in recitals and dance competitions. I took one tap class - literally one class - and then I quit.
Michael AngaranoTalking about success in society, no one can complain, because today everyone can choose what he or she wants. They don't just have to choose between being proletarian or middle-class. Those kinds of things do not exist anymore. Today working class boys can play football and become multimillionaires. On football! There are no longer classes, who say that we are poor, we are suppressed by you etc.
Odd NerdrumMy English teacher, Dr. John Lindstrom, taught me an appreciation for the written word. Until his class, I'd dabbled in journalism and essay writing. But when he selected one of my essays as the best in the class, it gave me the confidence to see myself as a writer.
Kareem Abdul-JabbarI grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.
JRIn 1980, when I graduated from high school, my goal was to be on 'The Tonight Show' with Johnny Carson at least once before our ten-year class reunion. Our class reunion was in June of 1990, and I was on 'The Tonight Show' in April 1990, so I made it by a few months.
Jeff DunhamThe more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.
Ernest MandelThe middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
Martin AmisIf we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.
Robert HassI am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.
Walker PercyIt's exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that. That's an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
Alan LightmanCapitalism improves the quality of life for the working class not just because it leads to improved wages but also because it produces new, better, and cheaper goods.... Indeed, with capitalism, the emphasis shifted to producing goods as cheaply as possible for the masses--the working class--whereas artisans had previously produced their goods and wares mostly for the aristocracy. Under capitalism every business wants to cater to the masses, for that is where the money is.
Thomas DiLorenzoTuesdayโwe had school for the first time. Madame OโMalley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. โAwful,โ a girl said. โEn franรงais,โ Madame OโMalley replied. โEn franรงais.
John GreenA stronger middle class is not the consequence of economic growth. A stronger middle class is the cause of economic growth.
Martin O'MalleyClass is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.
Jim ShepardIt's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods.
John Michael GreerClass is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.
Rita Mae Brown