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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"The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread."
"I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers."
"If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort - provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly."
"The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind."
"We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens."
"American working men are principals in the three-member team of capital, management, labor. Never have they regarded themselves as a servile class that could attain freedom only through destruction of the industrial economy."
"When people are educated, the distinction between classes disappears."
"Only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are."
"The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate."
"If you travel the earth, you will find it is largely divided into two classes of people-people who say 'I wonder why such and such is not done" and people who say "Now who is going to prevent me from doing that thing?""
"Inside each of you is a rich person, a poor person & a middle class person. It is up to you to decide which person you become."
"The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny."
"The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad."
"No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers."
"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."
"The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class."
"What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost."
"We owe to every businessperson and worker in America the best environment in the world to create a job. We owe that to American business. 35 percent corporate tax rate is the second highest in the world. We need to lower it so they don’t leave."
"Probably it's insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other."
"I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder."
