Class quotes
4.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside class — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Did you ever meet someone named Caleb?" I say. 'Caleb," Fernando says. "Yes, there was a Caleb in my initiate class. Brilliant, but he was... what's the colloquial term for it? A suck-up." he smirks."
"America is full of businesses bearing old Christian names, but which are really owned and run by Jews. Most of them have been acquired in the manner I have just described, the way the Jew creates something out of nothing (slow strangling). The Jew, better than anyone else in the world knows how to dispossess the poor and the members of the middle classes. To fit this case, the old P.T. Barnum adage needs only a little changing. A gentile enters business every minute, with two Jews waiting to take him out of it."
"I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am."
"I owe my allegiance to the working class."
"I was the new boy. It was like joining a new class at school where everybody knows everybody else but me."
"Fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class - Hope your surgery went well!"
"I love going to the gym and taking aerobics classes and kickboxing. Doing a variety of activities keeps it fresh and helps work other muscles that could potentially help you with your game."
"The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks, and middle-class straights."
"Life is a classroom -- only those who are willing to be lifelong learners will move to the head of the class."
"The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent)."
"There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else."
"The People's democratic dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most far-sighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution fails and that with the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs."
"Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary. Whoever sides with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism is a counter-revolutionary. Whomever sides with the revolutionary people in words only but acts otherwise is a revolutionary in speech. Whoever sides with the revolutionary people in deed as well as in word is a revolutionary in the full sense."
"Worked hard on [our message of strengthening the middle class, working people], but it didn't come through in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.It really should have, because people are struggling. And the Democratic message and the Democratic platform would help them, but somehow it didn't come up the way it should have. But it will."
"Day after day, night after night, my life at home is far from bright, but even home has more variety, than I can find in cafe society."
"If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that repect."
"Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else."
"Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead"
"The demi-monde does not represent the crowd of courtesans, but the class of declassed women It is divided from that of honest women by public scandal, and divided from that of the courtesans by money."
"I was a working-class macho guy who was used to being served and Yoko didn't buy that. From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights."
