Best 32 quotes in «social class quotes» category

We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.

Americans, whether armed or not, were still looking everywhere but at social class when parsing the texture of their lives. It wasn’t so much that stressed-out blue-collar folks were clinging bitterly to their guns and religion, as Barack Obama had posited while running for president. It was more that guns and religion were keeping them from feeling bitter about the indignities inflicted on the middle class.

Whether it is big or small, the size of a poor man’s yard incessantly reminds him that he is poor.

But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can give impudence to his betters!

For a slave to be taught that he should no longer lie and cheat with revolutionary; more astonishing still was the slave's discovery that he did not want to lie or cheat and that he now loved the owner whom he had once resented and feared.

Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy.

For their holidays: the rich’s kids travel the world; the poor’s kids roam around their grandparents’ yard.

For their holidays: the rich go see the world; the poor go see their parents.

Morals are like social classes, there are poor and rich people.

He was stupid, yes; he had never had any schooling; he didn't know how to explain himself. Was he in jail because he doesn't know how to explain things right? What was wrong with his being stupid? He worked like a slave, day in and day out. [...] Was it his fault he was stupid? Who was to blame?

How much of us is what we do?

I'll put it on my table where I keep my drawings," Hassan said. His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.

From what I could see, men or women, children or adults, young or aged, rich or poor, war was making everyone equal.

It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold.

monomachy? Impossible. I'm not of the contending class

Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.

Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.

Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.

Poor people do not go on holiday; they go home.

The boundaries that divide these worlds help define within each of them radically different ways of perceiving what it is possible to be or to become, of perceiving what it is possible to aspire to or not.

Starling knew what the malicious Dr. Lecter would say, and it was true: she was afraid there was something tacky that Senator Martin saw in her, something cheap, something thief-like that Senator Martin reacted to. That Vanderbilt bitch. Dr. Lecter would relish pointing out that class resentment, the buried anger that comes with mother's milk, was a factor too. Starling gave away nothing to any Martin in education, intelligence, drive, and certainly physical appearance, but still it was there and she knew it.

The degradation of love here serves merely as a social defence mechanism. The stability of medieval feudal society and even that of the courtly society of the seventeenth century was not threatened by the dangers of love; they needed no such defence against the excesses of prodigal sons. But now, when the frontiers between the social castes are crossed more and more frequently and not only the nobility but also the bourgeoisie has to defend a privileged position in society, the excommunication of the wild, incalculable love-passion, which threatens the prevailing social order, begins, and a literature arises which finally leads to the Dame aux camélias and to our Garbo films.

The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.

The last time everyone loved or at least liked everyone was when the world had a population of about 4.

The peasant is the foundation of the state and must be governed with care. He must be allowed neither too much, nor too little, but just enough rice to live on and keep for seed in the following year. The remainder must be taken from him in tax.

The poor, I am told, are kind to each other but that is because they have nothing to lose,' he said. 'The rich cannot afford to be.

The main point about civility is...the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.

There it is, forming behind us: The Fat Blue Phalanx. All the smug self-satisfied maleness you can drink, and free refills at the station house. It's all I can see in cops, that patriarchal bullshit that will never yield to a contract of mutual respect. That grunting fuck-obsessed inability to deobjectify you and treat you as a person, it’s a subclass of male that will never, ever change, no matter what. There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they’d whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides you’re not supposed to let it get to you. You’re supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren’t allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don’t like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don’t) who if you’re lucky will offer to go beat them up knowing you won’t take him up on it because you know perfectly well he’d probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they’ve been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and the grime of uneducated testosterone. its thanx to our weak boyfriends that we have cops at all, surrogate cock and balls to maintain ‘order’, whatever that is. Or was. And where does it really leave you as a prisoner of the suburbs? Fuming over some tiny incident that the aggressors have already forgotten about, but you have the sinking feeling you've just sniffed the true underbelly and the aroma was not what you get in Calvin Klein ads. Scratch 'n' sniff, scratch 'n' sniff, peel the onion... will you ever get down to the reality of what this place is about? And I know I shouldn't brand individual cops with the big blue brush but in my mind these guys are a symbol of the whole iron-cage Boy system that makes me always a victim, no matter what I do, it's a cage I can't escape. I'm the little princess. They dominate, they aggress, they protect.

This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

The streets are a poor kid’s PlayStation™

The social function of court life is to enlist the support and adherence of the public for the ruling house. The Renaissance princes want to delude not only the people, they also want to make an impression o the nobility and bind it to the court. But they are not dependent on either its services or its company; they can use anyone, of whatever descent, provided he is useful. Consequently, the Italian courts of Renaissance differ from the medieval courts in their very constitution; they accept into their circle upstart adventurers and merchants who have made money, plebeian humanists and ill-bred artists - entirely as if they had all the traditional social qualifications. In contrast to the exclusive moral community of court chivalry, a comparatively free, fundamentally intellectual type of salon life develops at these courts which is, on the one hand the continuation of the aesthetic social culture of middle-class circles, such as described in the Decamerone and in the Paradiso degli Alberti, and represents, on the other, the preparatory stage in the development of those literary salons which play such an important part in the intellectual life of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.