Class quotes
4.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside class — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"He didn't have no respect as a professional fighter should, no class. I was going to make him pay with his health for everything he said... I wanted to do it very slowly. I wanted him to remember this for a long time."
"We're going to start seeing that it's actually less about race and more about class in the future. As much as we complain about the establishment discriminating against black people, we're going to start seeing that more of us are already in the establishment."
"Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations."
"It is common to distinguish necessaries, comforts, and luxuries; the first class including all things required to meet wants which must be satisfied, while the latter consist of things that meet wants of a less urgent character."
"Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious."
"Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful."
"At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was."
"The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous its rule."
"Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes."
"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."
"...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy."
"The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable."
"We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports"
"I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality."
"The women who line up at a comic's dressing-room door are not what you'd call your class groupies."
"In the lexicon of the political class, the word 'sacrifice' means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it."
"In working class districts, you had several families living together in the one house, and it was very difficult to get a house, because the politicians who controlled housing were doing so in a very discriminatory fashion."
"The best real-estate investments with the highest yields are in working-class neighborhoods, because fancy properties are overpriced."
"I was never top of the class at school, but my classmates must have seen potential in me, because my nickname was Einstein."
"I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow men. I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally."
