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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"Last week I lost my temper in my karate class. Man, I'm not doing that again until I'm a black belt. Because I can tell you there's a difference between taking karate and receiving karate."
"When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder."
"Introversion- along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness- is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living in the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform."
"We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned."
"With every failure, every crisis, every difficult time, I say - What is this here to teach me? And as soon as you get the lesson, you get to move on. If you really get the lesson, you pass and you don't have to repeat the class. My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment."
"The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar."
"We're going to have to invest in the American people again, in tax cuts for the middle class, in health care for all Americans, and college for every young person who wants to go. In businesses that can create the new energy economy of the future. In policies that will lift wages and will grow our middle class. These are the policies I have fought for my entire career."
"I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations."
"If the educated and influential classes in a community either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes?"
"When posh boys get into trouble they sack the servants."
"Diana Ross is a big inspiration to all of us. We all grew up watching everything about her - her mike placement, her grace, her style and her class."
"The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the ignorance and the oppression of the people."
"I'm a working-class person, working with class."
"The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."
"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry."
"I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm."
"The confidence you need is belief in your potential. If you see world-class potential in yourself, you'll put in the effort. If you don't see the potential, you won't put in the effort and you'll wait for the performance, and the performance always follows the belief in self."
"I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of the class."
"Financial leverage is the advantage the rich have over the poor and middle class."
"I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
