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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"There is tremendous long-term harm when Americans accept ethnic and class balkanization as a de facto fixture of American life. I think that impoverishes our understanding of each other."
"Go ahead and make something for the elites. Not the elites of class or wealth, but the elites of curiosity, passion and taste. Every great thing ever created was created by and for this group."
"I always travel first class on a train. It's the only way to avoid one's creditors."
"When you become famous you get to torture a higher class of man than before."
"When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes."
"[A pariah is] something like a martyr with more suffering and less class."
"As for loving woman, I have never understood why some people had a fit. I still don't. It seems fine to me. If an individual is productive responsible, and energetic, why should her choice in a partner make such a fuss? The government is only too happy to take my tax money and yet they uphold legislation that keeps me a second class citizen. Surely, there should be a tax break for those of us who are robbed of full and equal participation and protection in the life of our nation."
"The human animal varies from class to class, culture to culture. In one way we are consistent: We are irrational."
"There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people."
"That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true."
"Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society."
"What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class."
"It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance."
"America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory."
"Just as the results of inebriety are most painful to the habitually sober, and just as the greatest saints have often been the greatest sinners, so, when the first class brain does something stupid, the stupidity of that occasion is colossal."
"To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive."
"That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments."
"George Carlin's album, 'Class Clown,' came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I'd come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don't even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it."
"Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes - one rich, one poor - both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?"
"We are creating a culture where content creators are a new servant class, and paid as such."
