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.
"Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day."
"As a viewer, I'm personally less interested in the damaged, white, middle-class male figuring out his dreams and more interested in maybe an underdog figuring out how they're going to survive in a world that doesn't necessarily invite them in."
"Morality for the upper classes, the gallows for the rabbles."
"If any of you have seen my shows, you know that I don't skimp on them and the same is true for the gym. We spend what it takes to make a globally first-class gym."
"I know of no system other than Hinduism under which a class has been set apart from generation to generation for the exclusive pursuit of divine knowledge and consigned to voluntary poverty."
"Untouchability of foreign cloth is as much a virtue with all of us as untouchability of the suppressed classes must be a sin with every devout Hindu."
"In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time."
"But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society."
"All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital , and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it."
"What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals."
"Work is the curse of the drinking class. I can resist everything except temptation. Moderation is a fatal thing - nothing succeeds like excess. We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars."
"In England ... education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square."
"I don't have a set routine, but I try to squeeze in a workout every day, whether it's taking a hike, taking a Pilates class, or just putting in a workout DVD. Whatever it takes!"
"It's a terrible shame if you're born the brightest guy in your class. If you're not, then you have to hustle-and that's good."
"Calpurnia evidently remembered a rainy Sunday when we were both fatherless and teacherless. Let to its own devices, the class tied Eunice Ann Simpson to a chair and placed her in the furnace room. We forgot her, trooped upstairs to church, and were listening quietly to the sermon when a dreadful banging issued from the radiator pipes, persisting until someone investigated and brought forth Eunice Ann saying she didn't want to play Shadrach any more - Jem Finch said she wouldn't get burnt if she had enough faith, but it was hot down there."
"Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless."
"Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice."
"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."
"There is one class of men, whom it especially behoves to be tenacious of the right of free discussion. I mean the poor."
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."
