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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"I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me."
"I distrust Great Men... I believe in aristocracy, though... Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet... They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke."
"But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room."
"For you cannot have gentility without paying for it."
"How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species"
"Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?"
"The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people--life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves."
"At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it."
"Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not a negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them."
"I do not want two classes of citizens in this country. I want everybody to prosper. That's going to be a top priority."
"We can't afford more top-down economics. What we need are policies that will grow and strengthen the middle class."
"You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life."
"It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth - a rising, thriving middle class."
"I'll go anywhere and I'll do whatever it takes to get this done. It's too important for Washington to screw this up. Now's the time for us to work on what we all agree to, which is let's keep middle-class taxes low. That's what our economy needs. That's what the American people deserve."
"I refuse to accept any approach that isn't balanced. I'm not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit while people like me, making over $250,000, aren't asked to pay a dime more in taxes."
"This is not class warfare. It’s math."
"I look forward to teaching the occasional class, 'cause I was a professor. And I had fun doing it."
"Go back to - my first campaign for the United States Senate. I got a bunch of people now talking about inequality. But back then they sure weren't. Back then, folks were saying I was preaching class warfare. Now it's suddenly their campaign platform."
"What we have to do is make sure that here in America, if you work hard, you can get ahead. If you worked hard, not only did you have a good job, but you also had decent benefits, decent health care. We've got to make sure that we're doing everything we can to expand the middle class and people who are working hard can get into the middle class."
"There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing."
